Death Of An Idealist: In Search Of Neil Aggett is the story behind the only white detainee to die in custody of apartheid's security police.

A medical doctor who worked most of the week as an unpaid trade union organiser, Neil Aggett's stark non-materialism, shared by his partner Dr Elizabeth Floyd, aroused the suspicions. When their names appeared on a list of 'Close Comrades' prepared for ANC leaders in exile they were among a swathe of union activists detained in 1981. Beverley Naidoo traces the transformation of the youngest child born to settler parents in Kenya at the height of Mau Mau resistance to colonial rule.

The book explores the metamorphosis of a high-achieving, sports-loving white schoolboy into the 28-year-old whose coffin was followed by thousands of workers through Johannesburg to his grave. The extraordinary funeral and the preceding national work stoppage were a watershed for trade union unity. First-hand interviews reveal the fraught, intense world of activists inside the country in the late '70s and early '80s as the ANC-in-exile pushed to link with emerging black unions. Neil's non-materialism and his concern about to whom union organisers should be democratically accountable still demand engagement today.

Poignant, personal stories run through this fully-referenced biography of a stoic, stubborn, principled thinker who became a militant yet gentle activist. They include the huge rift with a dominant father who later ploughed his savings into his son's inquest, funding a top legal team led by George Bizos SC who offers the foreword to Death of an Idealist.

This book asks how governments in Africa can use evidence to improve their policies and programmes, and ultimately, to achieve positive change for their citizens.

Looking at different evidence sources across a range of contexts, the book brings policy makers and researchers together to uncover what does and doesn't work and why. Case studies are drawn from five countries and the ECOWAS (west African) region, and a range of sectors from education, wildlife, sanitation, through to government procurement processes. The book is supported by a range of policy briefs and videos intended to be both practical and critically rigorous. It uses evidence sources such as evaluations, research synthesis and citizen engagement to show how these cases succeeded in informing policy and practice.

The voices of policy makers are key to the book, ensuring that the examples deployed are useful to practitioners and researchers alike. This innovative book will be perfect for policy makers, practitioners in government and civil society, and researchers and academics with an interest in how evidence can be used to support policy making in Africa.

Drawing on the wide-ranging artistic experience gained in his years of acting and writing for theatre, Sol first ventured into poetry in 1977. Here he found he could more intensely express the thoughts and feelings garnered from his acute sense of observation.

People, their interaction with the environment and the socio-political and cultural times, the pains and hopes of a generation and the multi-facetted world of an evolving Johannesburg are the inspiration of his deeply-felt poems and ballads. Ordinary activities, every-day occurrences, a chance conversation overheard between two street-cleaners, the brutal death of a young political activist at the hands of security police, observations on the crime, violence and morals of naked Soweto - all are evoked in haunting, nostalgic and sometimes ironic reminiscences which recreate a period slowly fading from memory.

He turns a blistering spotlight on some incidents, encapsulated in a few, searing words. Others he treats with tenderness, understanding and an empathy which resounds within the reader's own emotions. Life at its most basic is counterbalanced by deep philosophic probings. There are unspoken challenges to question and to act as did the young people of those chaotic '70s.

In 1968, two young medical students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination. Their love story is also the story of the founding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) by a group of 15 principled and ambitious students at the University of Natal in Durban in the early 1970s.

In this deeply personal book, Hlumelo Biko, who was born of Steve and Mamphela’s union, movingly recounts his parents’ love story and how the BCM’s message of black self-love and self-reliance helped to change the course of South African history.

Based on interviews with some of the BCM’s founding members, Black Consciousness describes the early years of the movement in vivid detail and sets out its guiding principles around a positive black identity, black theology and the practice of Ubuntu through community-based programmes.

In spiritual conversation with his father, Hlumelo re-examines what it takes to live a Black Consciousness life in today’s South Africa. He also explains why he believes his father – who was brutally murdered by the apartheid police in 1977 – would have supported true radical economic transformation if he were alive today.

Even though the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 ended more than 110 years ago, no extensive study on the sites of remembrance of this war that covers the country as a whole and is based on methodological research has thus far been published.

This book is aimed at filling that void. This is a study of commemorative sites with a difference. The text guides the reader in two ways simultaneously. In the first place it provides information on the vast number (more than 1 200) and wide range of Anglo-Boer War places of remembrance in South Africa. These include monuments, memorials such as plaques and tablets, historical sites such as battlefields and concentration camp locations, buildings that have a specific connection with the war, statues, busts and bas-relief sculptures, historical paintings, museum collections and, of course, since it has to do with a war, cemeteries and graves.

Secondly, the book places all the sites that are included in their historical context. To simply indicate the approximate location of a war site, without providing a proper indication on how the site fits into the broad history of the event that it commemorates, is of limited value. For that reason the places of remembrance are introduced to the reader against the background of the history which they mirror. This means in effect that the reader acquires, together with information on the places of remembrance, a concise history of the war as a whole. As a result the book will not only be useful to readers who travel to the sites, but also to readers and users who are not actually travelling (virtual tourists).

Following on an introduction on the nature and scope of the commemorative places of the Anglo-Boer War, the sites are introduced in a thematic-chronological manner. The book is based on extensive research and field work. The author himself visited and photographed more than 90% of the sites that are included. A large number of sources were consulted to ensure the correctness of the information that is provided.

Even though the book is research-based, and will be useful to both scholars on the war and the general public, ideological issues are not discussed. The focus is on the physical places of remembrance as such. The book is written from a neutral point of departure – it is neither pro-Briton nor pro-Boer. Approximately 60% of the places of remembrance that are included in the book commemorate the British forces and 40% the Republican forces.

Racist Culture offers an anti-essentialist and non-reductionist account of racialized discourse and racist expression. Goldberg demonstrates that racial thinking is a function of the transforming categories and conceptions of social subjectivity throughout modernity. He shows that rascisms are often not aberrant or irrational but consistent with prevailing social conceptions, particularly of the reasonable and the normal.

He shows too how this process is being extended and renewed by categories dominant in present day social sciences: "the West"; "the underclass"; and "the primitive". This normalization of racism reflected in the West mirrors South Africa an its use and conception of space.

Goldberg concludes with an extended argument for a pragmatic, antiracist practice.

Six years after the Marikana massacre we have still seen minimal change for mine workers and mining communities. Although much has been written about how little has been done, few have looked into how, in 2012, such tragedy was even possible. Lonmin Platinum Mine and the events of 16 August are a microcosm of the mining sector and how things can go wrong when society leaves everything to government and “big business”.

Business As Usual After Marikana is a comprehensive analysis of mining in South Africa. Written by respected academics and practitioners in the field, it looks into the history, policies and business practices that brought us to this point.

Translated from the German Zum Beispiel: BASF – Uber Konzernmacht und Menschenrechte, it also examines how bigger global companies like BASF were directly or indirectly responsible, and yet nothing is done to keep them accountable.

Z Pallo Jordan is the quintessential man of political letters on the one hand, and an astute literary historian in his own inimitable way, penning flowing observations, interspersed with pithy and yet colourful descriptions on the other hand – while cutting to the bone in analyses and breath-taking insights, informed by meticulous reading amassed over nearly half a century of struggle. Letters to Friends and Comrades is the ultimate collection of his piercing and yet embraceable thoughts and inquiries. This treasure trove of the writings of Z Pallo Jordan could not have been more timely in this critical – or should we say unfortunate – period of the promise that was the New Democratic Republic of South Africa, and published as it is on the eve of the African National Congress’s general elective congress in December 2017, and interestingly in the aftermath of the watershed municipal elections of 3 August 2016.

Jacana Media is proud to make this important book available again, now with a completely new introduction. First published by Oceanbooks, New York and Melbourne and University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg in 2001, the book was short-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in 2002.

In the public imagination the struggle that saw the end of apartheid and the inauguration of a democratic South Africa is seen as one waged by black people who were often imprisoned or killed for their efforts. Raymond Suttner, an academic, is one of a small group of white South Africans who was imprisoned for his efforts to overthrow the apartheid regime. He was first arrested in 1975 and tortured with electric shocks because he refused to supply information to the police. He then served 8 years because of his underground activities for the African National Congress and South African Communist Party.

After his release in 1983, he returned to the struggle and was forced to go underground to evade arrest, but was re-detained in 1986 under repeatedly renewed states of emergency, for 27 months, 18 of these in solitary confinement, because whites were kept separately and all other whites apart from Suttner were released. In the last months of this detention Suttner was allowed to have a pet lovebird, which he tamed and used to keep inside his tracksuit. When he was eventually released from detention in September 1988 the bird was on his shoulder. Suttner was held under stringent house arrest conditions, imposed to impede further political activities. He, however, defied his house arrest restrictions and attended an Organisation for African Unity meeting in Harare in August 1989 and he remained out of the country for five months. Shortly after his return, when he anticipated being re-arrested, the state of emergency was lifted and the ANC and other banned organisations were unbanned. Suttner became a leading figure in the ANC and SACP.

The book describes Suttner’s experience of prison in a low-key, unromantic voice, providing the texture of prison life, but unlike most ‘struggle memoirs’ it is also intensely personal. Suttner is not averse to admitting his fears and anxieties.

The new edition contains an introduction where Suttner describes his break with the ANC and SACP. But, he argues, the reason for his rupturing this connection that had been so important to his life were the same – ethical reasons – that had led him to join. He remains convinced that what he did was right and continues to act in accordance with those convictions.

The question was: would he hang? In 1963, when South Africa's apartheid government charged Nelson Mandela with planning its overthrow, most observers feared that he would be sentenced to death. But the support he and his fellow activists in the African National Congress received during his trial not only saved his life, but also enabled him to save his country. In Saving Nelson Mandela, South African law expert Kenneth S. Broun recreates the trial-called the "Rivonia" Trial after the Johannesburg suburb where police seized Mandela. Based upon interviews with many of the case's primary figures and portions of the trial transcript, Broun situates readers inside the courtroom at the imposing Palace of Justice in Pretoria. Here, the trial unfolds through a dramatic narrative that captures the courage of the accused and their defense team, as well as the personal prejudices that colored the entire trial. The Rivonia trial had no jury and only a superficial aura of due process, combined with heavy security that symbolized the apartheid government's system of repression. Broun shows how outstanding advocacy, combined with widespread public support, in fact backfired on apartheid leaders, who sealed their own fate. Despite his 27-year incarceration, Mandela's ultimate release helped move his country from the racial tyranny of apartheid toward democracy. As documented in this inspirational book, the Rivonia trial was a critical milestone that helped chart the end of Apartheid and the future of a new South Africa.

For nearly ten years - indeed more if we include his period of influence under Mandela's presidency - Thabo Mbeki bestrode South Africa's political stage. Despite attempts by some in the new ANC leadership to airbrush out his role, there can be little doubt that Mbeki was a seminal figure in South Africa's new democracy, one who left a huge mark in many fields, perhaps most controversially in state and party management, economic policy, public health intervention, foreign affairs and race relations. If we wish to understand the character and fate of post-1994 South Africa, we must therefore ask: What kind of political system, economy and society has the former President bequeathed to the government of Jacob Zuma and to the citizens of South Africa generally? This question is addressed head-on here by a diverse range of analysts, commentators and participants in the political process. Amongst the specific questions they seek to answer: What is Mbeki's legacy for patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class and gender? How, if at all, did his presidency reshape relations within the state, between the state and the ruling party and between the state and society? How did he reposition South Africa on the continent and in the world? This book will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the current political landscape in South Africa, and Mbeki's role in shaping it.

Die gevierde historikus Hermann Giliomee beskou die val van wit regering in Suid-Afrika uit ’n prikkelende nuwe hoek: Pleks van onpersoonlike magte, of die vindingrykheid van ’n onstuitbare weerstandsbeweging, beklemtoon hy die rol van die Nasionale leiers en hul uitgesproke kritikus, Van Zyl Slabbert. Wat het die laaste Afrikanerleiers, van Verwoerd tot De Klerk, aangevuur? Hoe het hulle sekuriteit, ekonomiese groei en wit bevoorregting probeer versoen met die eise van ’n immer meer uitgesproke swart leierskap – en met foutiewe volkskattings?

In sy verkenning van elke leier se agtergrond, denke en persoonlikheid, neem Giliomee stelling in teenoor die idee dat Suid-Afrika in 1994 onafwendbaar op ’n ANC-oorwinning afgestuur het. Hoewel hy die belang van strukturele magte erken, argumenteer hy dat historiese toevallighede en die gehalte van leierskap die landspolitiek radikaal beïnvloed het.

Openhartige gesprekke met ’n magdom betrokkenes en talle primêre bronne werp dramatiese nuwe lig op sleutelmomente: Verwoerd se aanbod in 1950 aan stedelike swart leiers, die inval in Angola in 1975, die onverwagte deurbraak wat die arbeidshervormings moontlik gemaak het, Botha se geheime poging in 1984 om ’n ooreenkoms met die Sowjetunie aan te gaan, die agtergrond tot die rampspoedige Rubikon-toespraak, tronkgesprekke met Mandela, bosberade waar die kabinet taktiek beplan het – en hoe die Nasionale Party in die onderhandelinge nie sy beloftes kon nakom nie.

Giliomee bied ’n prikkelende politieke geskiedenis. Eerder as om te veroordeel, probeer hy verstaan waarom die laaste Afrikanerleiers opgetree het soos hulle het, en hoekom hul eie beleid hulle uiteindelik in die steek gelaat het.

Renowned historian Hermann Giliomee challenges the conventional wisdom on the downfall of white rule: Instead of impersonal forces, or the resourcefulness of an indomitable resistance movement, he emphasises the role of Nationalist leaders and of their outspoken critic, Van Zyl Slabbert. What motivated each of the last Afrikaner leaders, from Verwoerd to De Klerk? How did each try to reconcile economic growth, white privilege and security with the demands of an increasingly assertive black leadership and unexpected population figures?

In exploring each leader’s background, reasoning and personal foibles, Giliomee takes issue with the assumption that South Africa was inexorably heading for an ANC victory in 1994. He argues that historical accidents radically affected the course of politics.

Drawing on primary sources and personal interviews, this book sheds dramatic new light on many key moments: Verwoerd’s offer to the urban black leadership in 1950, the incursion into Angola in 1975, the unexpected breakthrough that made possible the labour reforms, Botha’s secret attempt in 1984 to forge a pact with the Soviet Union, the background to the disastrous Rubicon speech and the National Party backtracking in the negotiations.

Giliomee offers a fresh and stimulating political history which attempts not to condemn, but to understand why the last Afrikaner leaders did what they did, and why their own policies ultimately failed them.

A Darker Shade Of Pale tells the story of life as a person of mixed race in apartheid South Africa.

After the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, the all-white government took control by legislating their policies of racial segregation under a system called apartheid. Forced to live among the sand dunes and narrow streets of Council housing estates, through her mixed ancestry Beryl was classified as Coloured, not white enough or not black enough. This allowed the government to shape her life, where she was allowed to live, to attend school, to sit on the train, to work, and who she could marry.

Growing up in council housing estates on the Cape Flats in the 1960s and early 1970s it wasn’t until reaching high school that she discovered a richer life on the other side of the tracks for those classified as white. The stark reality of the inequality towards her skin colour made her question her ancestry and her parents’ acceptance of their classification. She was drawn to joining rallies to fight the government but at home any such discussions were strongly dismissed.

It is a remarkable story of the resilience of her parents, particularly her mother Sarah who recognised that the future for her children was through education. Sarah, faced with many challenges – the death of a young child, a husband suffering ill-health, five children to feed and to keep a roof over their head powered the way forward to increase their chances of a better life should apartheid crumble.

A Darker Shade Of Pale is a moving account of Beryl’s family and community life in segregated South Africa – the injustices, humiliation and challenges and finally finding acceptance when she moved to Australia in the 1980s.

South Africa’s hard-won democracy, symbolised by the late liberation hero Nelson Mandela, was the main victim of the chaos in parliament during President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address.

In Recovering Democracy in South Africa, Raymond Suttner brings together the best of his recent writings and essays; he offers a fresh look at the wide range of contentious issues that currently preoccupy South Africans, from the threat to constitutionalism to problems with leadership and questions of ethics.

The book is as much an in-depth engagement with our difficult present as it is a damning account of the politics of the Zuma era.

This book comes out at a time when South Africa faces its own challenges. What the future holds for South Africa depends on what each of us puts into reclaiming our democracy and the values that underpin our country.

We Are No Longer At Ease is a collection of personal articles, essays, speeches and poetry mainly from voices of young people who were part of the student-led protest movement known as #FeesMustFall which began in 2015. It tells the journey of a youth that participated in a movement that redefined politics in post-apartheid South Africa and is the evidence of a “born free” generation telling their own story and leading discourse as well as action on transforming South Africa.

The collection includes works by the young student leaders turned academic and public commentators such as David Maimela, Thapelo Tselapedi and Sisonke Msimang; student newspaper journalists that were covering the protests like Natasha Ndlebe; public writing commentators with aims to inform and teach the broader South African society about the aspects of the movement like Yamkela Spengane and Rofhiwa Maneta; lecturers who were assisting the students articulate and find clarity in the way they shaped and voiced their ideas such as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and then of course others were foot soldiers on the ground leading students through the police brutality of rubber bullets and pepper spray like Loverlyn Nwandeyi, Ntokozo Qwabe and Ramabina Mahapa.

This book lifts the veil on what it’s like to cross a chasm in South Africa - from newspaper editor opposing apartheid repression to adviser in the Presidency and government in democracy.

It is the personal story of Tony Heard, former Editor of the Cape Times, moving from journalist to spin-doctor, consultant, speechwriter and other official business.

His new career covers a decade in the Presidency as a special adviser (2000-2010), and a dozen years in 3 government ministries/departments. In all, he serves governance for 22 years (June 1994 to June 2016), most of the first quarter century of his country’s freedom.

Until Julius Comes is a rollicking, unprecedented journey through the wilds of South African politics. With his sharp wit and perceptive observations, Richard Poplak exposes the tricks of the political trade and the skullduggery that comes with it.

Writing under the byline Hannibal Elector, he spares no one: Julius Malema looks like a ‘Teletubbie in his EFF onesie’; Jacob Zuma is a tasteless home renovator with ‘no access to a Woolworths lifestyle magazine’ and Helen Zille sends out ‘Braveheart vibes’ as she guides her troops into battle.

In vignettes that switch between the hilarious, the tragic and the terrifying, Poplak rips back the curtain and exposes the country for what it is: a bustling, contested and divided circus trying to find its way to wholeness.

In 2012 Angy Peter was bringing up her young children with her husband, Isaac Mbadu, in Bardale, Mfuleni, on the Cape Flats.

Angy and Isaac were activists, leading the charge for a commission of inquiry into policing in Khayelitsha. Angy was vocally against vigilante violence and a go-to-person when demanding better services from the police.

But when the commission started its hearings Angy found herself instead on trial for murdering – necklacing – a young neighbourhood troublemaker, Rowan du Preez. The State’s case would centre on the accusation Rowan du Preez allegedly made with his dying breath – that Angy and her husband Isaac set the tyre alight around his neck.

Simone Haysom takes us into the heart of a mystery: was Angy Peter framed by the police for a murder she did not commit? Or was she, as the State argued, ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’, who won a young man’s trust then turned against him, in the most brutal way?

Simone Haysom spent four years meticulously researching this case and the result is a court-room drama interwoven with expert opinion and research into crime and the state of policing in the townships of South Africa.

The ANC received a bloody nose in the 2016 local elections, when it lost three major metros to the opposition. Will the fractured ruling party be able to reunite under Cyril Ramaphosa and gain a majority at the polls in 2019? Or could the DA and the EFF overcome their vast ideological divide to oust the ANC?

The South African political landscape has changed dramatically since Jacob Zuma stepped down as president. Veteran political journalist Jan-Jan Joubert looks at all the possible scenarios, taking us behind the scenes into a world of political horse trading to analyse the options available to all the parties in the run-up to the next election. Will the oldest liberation movement in Africa have to form a coalition to stay in power? And what is the likelihood of the ANC’s turning to the EFF to bolster its support?

One thing is certain: deals will be done. By examining the results of the local elections, Joubert argues that the 2019 national elections may well be the first in 25 years in which no party wins an outright majority.

In exclusive interviews, political leaders also share their views on the major issues dividing – or perhaps uniting – South Africa today, and point the way to a new political future.

In 2013, former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents revealing that state agencies like the NSA had spied on the communications of millions of innocent citizens. International outrage resulted, but the Snowden documents revealed only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. Apart from insisting on their rights to tap into communications, more and more states are placing citizens under surveillance, tracking their movements and transactions with public and private institutions. The state is becoming like a one-way mirror, where it can see more of what its citizens do and say, while citizens see less and less of what the state does, owing to high levels of secrecy around surveillance.

In this book, Jane Duncan assesses the relevance of Snowden’s revelations for South Africa. In doing so she questions the extent to which South Africa is becoming a surveillance society governed by a surveillance state. Duncan challenges members of civil society to be concerned about and to act on the ever-expanding surveillance capacities of the South African state. Is surveillance used for the democratic purpose of making people safer, or is it being used for the repressive purpose of social control, especially of those considered to be politically threatening to ruling interests? She explores the forms of collective action needed to ensure that unaccountable surveillance does not take place and examines what does and does not work when it comes to developing organised responses.

This book is aimed at South African citizens, academics as well as the general reader, who care about our democracy and the direction it is taking.

A deeply moving and powerful biography of Fezekile Kuzwayo – better known as Khwezi – the woman the ANC tried to forget.

In August 2016, following the announcement of the results of South Africa’s heated municipal election, four courageous young women interrupted Jacob Zuma’s victory address, bearing placards asking us to ‘Remember Khwezi’. Before being dragged away by security guards, their powerful message had hit home and the public was reminded of the tragic events of 2006, when Zuma was on trial for the rape of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, better known as Khwezi. In the aftermath of the trial, which saw Zuma acquitted, Khwezi was vilified by his many supporters and forced to take refuge outside of South Africa.

Ten years later, just two months after this protest had put Khwezi’s struggle back into the minds and hearts of South Africans, Khwezi passed away … But not before she had slipped back into South Africa and started work with Redi Tlhabi on a book about her life. How as a young girl living in ANC camps in exile she was raped by the very men who were supposed to protect her; how as an adult she was driven once again into exile, suffering not only at the hands of Zuma’s devotees but under the harsh eye of the media.

In sensitive and considered prose, journalist Redi Tlhabi breathes life into a woman for so long forced to live in the shadows. In giving agency back to Khwezi, Tlhabi is able to focus a broader lens on the sexual abuse that abounded during the ‘struggle’ years, abuse which continues to plague women and children in South Africa today.

In this memoir, the first of two, Dikgang Moseneke pays homage to the many people and places that have helped to define and shape him. These influences include his ancestry; his parents; his immediate and extended family; and his education both in school and on Robben Island as a 15-year-old prisoner. These people and places played a significant role in forming his principled stance in life and his proud defiance of all forms of injustice.

Robben Island became a school not only in politics but an opportunity for dedicated studies towards a law degree that would provide the bedrock for a long and fruitful career. The book charts Moseneke’s rise as one of the country’s top legal minds, who not only helped to draft the Constitution, but for 15 years acted as a guardian of it for all South Africans.

Not only did Moseneke assist in shaping our new Constitution, he has helped to make it a living document for many South Africans over the past 15 years.

In the afternoon of May 10, 2015, Mmusi Maimane was announced as the new leader of the Democratic Alliance, beating his opponent by a huge margin. It was an historic event because it marked the completion of the DA’s transformation from a ‘white’ political party to one whose new leader shared similar experiences to those of the majority of voters.

Thus a highly intelligent and charismatic young man is thrust onto centre stage. But who is the real Mmusi Maimane? Experienced political reporter S’Thembiso Msomi goes behind the scenes to examine how and why Maimane rose to head up the opposition. He delves into Maimane’s formative years, his time at the pulpit in the church, and his family, to bring substance to the man.

Finally, the author attempts to answer these burning questions: is Maimane his own man, and can he deliver the electorate that the DA so fervently desires?

So much has been said about Marikana since the tragedy of 16 August 2012 where 34 miners were shot dead by police. South Africans are divided, with many supporting the miners and others supporting the police. The news and the images of the massacre made headlines around the globe for weeks. What the world didn’t take into account was who and what it took to bring that news from the small town of Rustenburg to the world.

Reporting from the Frontline by Gia Nicolaides is about personal experiences describing incidents behind the scenes from the main action. While most journalists spent weeks covering the unfolding events at Marikana, many didn’t have the opportunity to tell their own stories. A large group of journalists, producers and television presenters gathered at the North West Platinum Mine when several deaths were reported and the violence broke out. While the nation and the world focused on what was happening on the ground, no one asked how the media dealt with this tragedy. As with any good movie, critics want to know what it took to create it.

These stories will take you to the production centre of Marikana where the journalists watched, listened and interviewed in order to weave the stories together. The way Marikana was told to the world is quite different to what happened to the journalists who covered it. Their stories will show a completely different perspective.