In The Lie of 1652, influential blogger and history activist Mellet retells and debunks established pre­colonial and colonial land dispossession history. He provides a radically new, fresh perspective on South African history and highlights 176 years of San/Khoi colonial resistance.

Contextualising the cultural mix of the Cape, he recounts the history of forced and voluntary migration to the Cape by Africans, Indians, Southeast Asians, Europeans and the African Diaspora in a new way.

This provocative, novel perspective on 'Colouredness' also provides a highly topical new look at the burning issue of land, and how it was lost.

In Critique Of Black Reason, eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness - from the Atlantic slave trade to the present - to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations between colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital.

Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion.

With Critique Of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

In 2011 while riding his motorbike through Mali, on his way home from London to Johannesburg, Stephen McGown was taken captive in Timbuktu by Al Qaeda. He was held captive for almost six years giving him the unenviable record of Al Qaeda’s longest held prisoner.

Together with writer Tudor Caradoc-Davies, he wrote his book Six Years With Al Qaeda: The Stephen McGown Story. In this inspirational biography Steve uncovers the extraordinary lengths he went through to survive; from learning French and Arabic, converting to Islam and accepting a name given to him by his captors. His aim was to raise his status among Al Qaeda, keep himself alive and hopefully make his way back home.

Thousands of kilometres away in Johannesburg, the shock of his kidnapping hit his wife Cath and the rest of the McGown family. Working every option they could find, from established diplomatic protocols to the murky back channels of the kidnap game, they set to work on trying to free Steve.

Months turned to years and while the captive-captor dynamic was ever-present, Steve witnessed first hand what no westerner has ever seen before, giving him a nuanced perspective on one of the worlds most feared terrorist organisations.

In a groundbreaking examination of the antislavery origins of liberal Protestantism, Molly Oshatz contends that the antebellum slavery debates forced antislavery Protestants to adopt an historicist understanding of truth and morality. Unlike earlier debates over slavery, the antebellum slavery debates revolved around the question of whether or not slavery was a sin in the abstract. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to answer the proslavery claim that slavery was not a sin in and of itself, antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Moses Stuart, Leonard Bacon, and Horace Bushnell, argued that biblical principles opposed slavery and that God revealed slavery's sinfulness through the gradual unfolding of these principles. Although they believed that slavery was a sin, antislavery Protestants' sympathy for individual slaveholders and their knowledge of the Bible made them reluctant to denounce all slaveholders as sinners. In order to reconcile slavery's sinfulness with their commitments to the Bible and to the Union, antislavery Protestants defined slavery as a social rather than an individual sin. Oshatz demonstrates that the antislavery notions of progressive revelation and social sin had radical implications for Protestant theology. Oshatz carries her study through the Civil War to reveal how emancipation confirmed for northern Protestants the antislavery notion that God revealed His will through history. She describes how after the war, a new generation of liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Charles Briggs, and George Harris, drew on the example of antislavery and emancipation to respond to evolution and historical biblical criticism. The theological innovations rooted in the slavery debates came to fruition in liberal Protestantism's acceptance of the historical and evolutionary nature of religious truth.

Although puritans in 17th-century New England lived alongside both Native Americans and Africans, the white New Englanders imagined their neighbors as something culturally and intellectually distinct from themselves. Legally and practically, they saw people of color as simultaneously human and less than human, things to be owned. Yet all of these people remained New Englanders, regardless of the color of their skin, and this posed a problem for puritans. In order to fulfill John Winthrop's dream of a "city on a hill," New England's churches needed to contain all New Englanders. To deal with this problem, white New Englanders generally turned to familiar theological constructs to redeem not only themselves and their actions (including their participation in race-based slavery) but also to redeem the colonies' Africans and Native Americans. Richard A. Bailey draws on diaries, letters, sermons, court documents, newspapers, church records, and theological writings to tell the story of the religious and racial tensions in puritan New England.

The post-Civil War slave narrative isn't nearly so well known or widely taught as the antebellum texts by Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Box Brown, and others. But now that these antebellum narratives have taken their rightful place in courses in American literature, not to mention African American literature, it's time to make available four representative post-Civil War narratives, to ensure that teachers and readers understand the richness of the slave narrative and its continuing socio-political import after Emancipation. Few people know that there were almost as many narratives of slavery published in the fifty years following the end of slavery as there were during the fifty years before abolition. Post-Civil War narratives don't merely recapitulate the themes and issues of the antebellum texts. Postwar narratives have a more varied agenda, owing largely to the fact that their authors did not have to adhere so closely to the antislavery movement's priorities and aims. Postwar narratives compare life in freedom to life in slavery in ways that most antebellum narrators do not pursue, for instance. Postwar narratives bring the issue of class and economic mobility among black people, particularly after Emancipation, into much greater focus than appears in the antebellum narratives.

Making Slavery History focuses on how commemorative practices and historical arguments about the American Revolution set the course for antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. The particular setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of their roles as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book shows how local abolitionists, both black and white, drew on their state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize public opposition to Southern slavery. When it came to securing the citizenship of free people of color within the Commonwealth, though, black and white abolitionists diverged in terms of how they idealized black historical agency.
Although it is often claimed that slavery in New England is a history long concealed, Making Slavery History finds it hidden in plain sight. From memories of Phillis Wheatley and Crispus Attucks to representations of black men at the Battle of Bunker Hill, evidence of the local history of slavery cropped up repeatedly in early national Massachusetts. In fixing attention on these seemingly marginal presences, this book demonstrates that slavery was unavoidably entangled in the commemorative culture of the early republic-even in a place that touted itself as the "cradle of liberty."
Transcending the particular contexts of Massachusetts and the early American republic, this book is centrally concerned with the relationship between two ways of making history, through social and political transformation on the one hand and through commemoration, narration, and representation on the other. Making Slavery History examines the relationships between memory and social change, between histories of slavery and dreams of freedom, and between the stories we tell ourselves about who we have been and the possibilities we perceive for who we might become.

Many believe that support for the abolition of slavery was universally accepted in Vermont, but it was actually a fiercely divisive issue that rocked the Green Mountain State. In the midst of turbulence and violence, though, some brave Vermonters helped fight for the freedom of their enslaved Southern brethren. Thaddeus Stevens--one of abolition's most outspoken advocates--was a Vermont native. Delia Webster, the first woman arrested for aiding a fugitive slave, was also a Vermonter. The Rokeby house in Ferrisburgh was a busy Underground Railroad station for decades. Peacham's Oliver Johnson worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison during the abolition movement. Discover the stories of these and others in Vermont who risked their own lives to help more than four thousand slaves to freedom.

The Game Ranger, The Knife, The Lion And The Sheep offers spell-binding stories of some amazing, little known characters from South Africa, past and very past. Let us introduce you to some of the characters you’ll meet inside.

Starting with Krotoa, the Khoi maiden who is found working in the Van Riebeeck household as both servant and interpreter. In time she becomes the concubine of Danish surgeon Pieter Merhoff and later his wife. But did she jump (allured by the European glitz and good food) or was she pushed (abducted or sold to the Van Riebeeck’s by her uncle Atshumatso, otherwise Herry)? Was she raped or a willing sexual parter of Meerhoff? Women, like fresh meat and vegetables, were in short supply in those early colonial years in the Cape.

Then there is Mevrou Maria Mouton who preferred to socialise with the slaves than her husband on their farm in the Swartland, and with whom she conspired to murder him. What became of them is … best those gory details are glossed over for now.

And the giant Trekboer Coenraad de Buys, rebel, renegade, a man with a price on his head who married many women (none of them white) and fathered a small nation. The explorer Lichtenstein called him a modern-day Hercules. Then there are the men of learning and insight, such as Raymond Dart and Adrian Boshier, who opened up the world of myths and ancient artefacts so we now better understand the ancients and the world they created for us to inherit. Or James Kitching who broke open rocks in the Karoo to reveal creatures that inhabited this region long before even Africa was born.

And so, without further ado, we give you our selection of stories about remarkable characters from the veld. These stories will excite, entertain and enthral you! You will finish reading them wishing you had more!

The diary of Antera Duke is one of the earliest and most extensive surviving documents written by an African residing in coastal West Africa predating the arrival of British missionaries and officials in the mid-19th century. Antera Duke (ca.1735-ca.1809) was a leader and merchant in late eighteenth-century Old Calabar, a cluster of Efik-speaking communities in the Cross River region. He resided in Duke Town, forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean in modern-day southeast Nigeria. His diary, written in trade English from 18 January 1785 to 31 January 1788, is a candid account of daily life in an African community during a period of great historical interest. Written by a major African merchant at the height of Calabar's overseas commerce, it provides valuable information on Old Calabar's economic activity both with other African businessmen and with European ship captains who arrived to trade for slaves, produce and provisions. It is also unique in chronicling the day-to-day social and cultural life of a vibrant African community. Antera Duke's diary is much more than a historical curiosity; it is the voice of a leading African-Atlantic merchant who lived during an age of expanding cross-cultural trade. The book reproduces the original diary of Antera Duke, as transcribed by a Scottish missionary, Arthur W. Wilkie, ca. 1907 and published by OUP in 1956. A new rendering of the diary into standard English appears on facing pages, and the editors have advanced the annotation completed by anthropologist Donald Simmons in 1954 by editing 71 and adding 158 footnotes. The updated reference information incorporates new primary and secondary source material on Old Calabar, and notes where their editorial decisions differ from those made by Wilkie and Simmons. Chapters 1 and 2 detail the eighteenth-century Calabar slave and produce trades, emphasizing how personal relationships between British and Efik merchants formed the nexus of trade at Old Calabar. To build a picture of Old Calabar's regional trading networks, Chapter 3 draws upon information contained in Antera Duke's diary, other contemporary sources, and shipping records from the 1820s. Chapter 4 places information in Antera Duke's diary in the context of eighteenth-century Old Calabar political, social and religious history, charting how Duke Town eclipsed Old Town and Creek Town through military power, lineage strength and commercial acumen.

One of the earliest known published works written by an African author, The Interesting Narrative was a groundbreaking memoir that helped pave the way for the abolition of slavery. In it, Equiano describes his early life in Africa, his abduction and his gruelling journey across the world on a slave ship. Published in London once Equiano had secured his freedom, the runaway success of the book led to his financial independence, and he toured England, Scotland and Ireland lecturing on the horrors described in the book, and he dedicated his life to advocating for the abolition of slavery. Forgotten until the 1960s, The Interesting Narrative has again shot to fame, and is now considered the most detailed account of a slave's life, exposing the trials of the long road to freedom.

Slavery in the United States continues to loom large in our national consciousness and is a major curricular focus in African American studies, during Black History Month, and for slavery units. This is the first encyclopedia to focus on the typical experiences and roles and material life of female slaves in the United States from Colonial times to Emancipation. More than 150 essay entries written by a host of experts offer a unique perspective on the material life, events, typical experiences, and roles of enslaved women and girls in both their interactions with their owners and the little private time they could manage. This groundbreaking volume is an exciting focus for research and general browsing and belongs in all American History, Women's Studies, and African American Studies collections.

The coverage includes entries illuminating women's work, on the plantation, from the big house to the field and slave cabin as well as individual entrepeneurialship. Aspects of daily life such as food procurement and meals, folk medicine and healing, and hygiene are revealed. Material life is uncovered through entries such as Auction Block, Clothing and Adornments, and Living Quarters. Life cycle events from pregnancy and birthing to childcare to holidays and death and funeral customs are discussed. The resistance to slavery and its horrors are enumerated in many entries such as Abolition, Sexual Violence, and the Underground Railroad. A wider understanding of the different ways that slavery played out for various enslaved women can be seen in entries regarding African origins and that depict regions in the North and South such as Low Country and groups such as Maroon Communities. Profiles of noted female slaves and their works are also included. Accompanying the entries are suggestions for further reading. Further scholarly value is added with a chronology and selected bibliography. Numerous photos and sidebars complement the essays, with quotations from oral history and literature plus document excerpts.