In the early planning stages of Freedom Park, Robin Binckes participated as a member of the history sub-committee. The amount of debate and argument, much of it heated, astounded him. Practically every event discussed was interpreted from diametrically differing viewpoints. One of the most controversial topics was the Great Trek, the 1836 Boer exodus from the Cape Colony.

Traditionally writers on the subject have covered the event from a perspective not only of 'white history' but predominantly of 'Afrikaner history'. It has always been seen as 'an Afrikaner event'. It was anything but. As the Great Trek and the events leading up to it involved every section of the population - Zulu, Sotho, Ndebele, Xhosa, Khoisan, Khoikhoi, Coloured, British, English-speaking South African and Boer - it is time to portray the trek in that light, in the context of a unbiased, modern South Africa.

Like most history the dots are all connected; it is impossible to separate the Great Trek from events which took place as far back as the Portuguese explorers because those early events shaped the backdrop to the causes of the Great Trek. Most writers have specialized in the trek itself whereas Binckes has adopted a broader approach that studies the impact of the earlier white incursions and migrations - Portuguese, Dutch, French and British - on southern Africa, to create a better understanding of the trek and its causes. Drawing heavily on eyewitness accounts wherever possible, he has consolidated these with the perspectives of leading historians, the final product being an objective and comprehensive record of one of the seminal events in South African history.

This book shows that the Afrikaner was, is, and always will be, an important player in South African society, but it shows him as part of a bigger picture. The author distances himself from the noble characters stereotyped for the past two centuries and portrays them in their true light: wonderful, courageous people with human feelings, strengths and failings.

The definitive biography of Her Majesty The Queen by one of Britain’s leading royal authorities.

With original insights from those who know her best, new interviews with world leaders and access to unseen papers, bestselling author Robert Hardman explores the full, astonishing life of our longest reigning monarch in this compellingly authoritative yet intimate biography.

Elizabeth II was not born to be queen. Yet from her accession as a young mother of two in 1952 to the age of Covid-19, she has proved an astute and quietly determined figure, leading her family and her people through more than seventy years of unprecedented social change. She has faced constitutional crises, confronted threats against her life, rescued the Commonwealth, seen her prime ministers come and go, charmed world leaders, been criticised as well as feted by the media, and steered her family through a lifetime in the public eye.

Queen of Our Times is a must-read study of dynastic survival and renewal, spanning abdication, war, romance, danger and tragedy. It is a compelling portrait of a leader who remains as intriguing today as the day she came to the throne aged twenty-five.

This book explores South Africa’s tumultuous history from the aftermath of the Second Anglo-Boer War to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on never-before-published documentary evidence – including diaries, letters, eyewitness testimony and diplomatic reports – the book follows the South African people through the battles, elections, repression, resistance, strikes, massacres, economic crashes and health crises that have shaped the nation’s character.

Tracking South Africa’s path from colony to Union and from apartheid to democracy, History of South Africa documents the influence of key figures including Pixley Seme, Jan Smuts, Lilian Ngoyi, H.F. Verwoerd, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, P.W. Botha and Jacob Zuma. The book also gives detailed accounts of definitive events such as the 1922 Rand Revolt, the Defiance Campaign, Sharpeville, the Soweto uprising and the Marikana massacre. Looking beyond the country’s borders, it unpacks military conflicts such as the World Wars, the armed struggle and the Border War. The book explores the transition to democracy and traces the phases of ANC rule, from the Rainbow Nation to transformation to state capture. It examines the divisive and unifying role of sport, the ups and downs of the economy, and the impact of pandemics from the Spanish flu to AIDS and COVID-19.

As South Africa faces a crisis as severe as any in its history, the book shows that these challenges are neither unprecedented nor insurmountable, and that there are principles to be found in history that may lead us safely into the future.

South Africa’s democracy is often seen as a story of bright beginnings gone astray, a pattern said to be common to Africa. The negotiated settlement of 1994, it is claimed, ended racial domination and created the foundation for a prosperous democracy – but greedy politicians betrayed the promise of a new society.

In Prisoners Of The Past, Steven Friedman astutely argues that this misreads the nature of contemporary South Africa. Building on the work of the economic historian Douglass North and the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani, Friedman shows that South African democracy’s difficulties are legacies of the pre-1994 past. The settlement which ushered in majority rule left intact core features of the apartheid economy and society. The economy continues to exclude millions from its benefits, while racial hierarchies have proved stubborn: apartheid is discredited, but the values of the pre-1948 colonial era, the period of British colonisation, still dominate. Thus South Africa’s democracy supports free elections, civil liberties and the rule of law, but also continues past patterns of exclusion and domination.

Friedman reasons that this ‘path dependence’ is not, as is often claimed, the result of constitutional compromises in 1994 that left domination untouched. This bargain was flawed because it brought not too much compromise, but too little. Compromises extended political citizenship to all but there were no similar bargains on economic and cultural change. Using the work of the radical sociologist Harold Wolpe, Friedman shows that only negotiations on a new economy and society can free South Africans from the prison of the past.

Joe Modise (1929-2001), a Sophiatown bus driver-turned freedom fighter, was a humble man who tended to avoid the limelight. A protege of the Mandela leadership in the 1950s mass struggle, he was one of the youngest among that decade’s Treason Trial, and was a senior commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) from its inception, facing danger and privation most of his adult life. Modise served with acclaim as democratic South Africa’s first Minister of Defence and won the loyalty of his former enemy when many thought the country could be plunged into civil war or held to ransom by old-order apartheid generals. The fact that Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo selected him for key positions over five decades of exacting struggle testifies to their sustained confidence in him. This fact alone belies the impression some might have that he was an amoral warlord. As a government minister, he led a modest lifestyle and did not die a wealthy man.

This book interlinks frank and engaging interviews with family and friends, comrades­ in-arms and former adversaries. Those who knew him reveal a warm human being and provide endearing insights into who Modise really was.

As a soldier, statesman and leader, he has left behind an astonishing legacy that deserves to be widely known.

In Morafe, Khumisho Moguerane has written a luminous exploration of two generations of the prominent Molema family. They were ‘border people’, who straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana.

Beginning in the 1880s at the frontier of the new British territories of British Bechuanaland (North West and Northern Cape provinces) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), where the political boundary between these two territories is negligible and where skin colouring did not yet necessarily connect with a particular social or political status, nor did it yet really affect economic opportunity. Morafe ends in the 1950s, where the political boundary matters profoundly, dividing two very different colonial dispensations of colonial racial ordering and classification, and two separate traditions of nationalist politics.

With this landmark publication, Moguerane reveals that the ‘nation’ is less ‘out there’ in public institutions and political struggles, but ‘in here’, in the everyday drama of personal and ordinary lives.

What is your stake in the upcoming 2024 election in South Africa – the most crucial election since 1994? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome? As a businessperson, consumer, worker or farmer, you will be affected by the election results and the significant changes that are likely to appear in South Africa’s political economy. The 2024 election gives South Africans the opportunity to decide what the country and its political leadership will look like in the future.

Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? examines some critical questions about the country’s political and socioeconomic landscape today and whether the 2024 election outcome is likely to signal more gloom or will it rather pave the way for positive and enduring reforms. Edited by prominent economist Raymond Parsons, the book comprises pieces by some of South Africa’s leading intellectuals and thought leaders, all of whom have seriously considered South Africa’s post-election future.

Among the major themes emerging from the different chapters, which will help to steer the national agenda in the months and years ahead, are: South Africa’s political prospects after 2024; the future role of coalition politics in South Africa; the dynamics between business and the economy; what South Africa’s geopolitical leanings mean for the country’s trade competitiveness; how to make local government work; need for greater community engagement and why doing business in South Africa is challenging.

Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? is as absorbing as it is frank, informing readers (and, importantly, voters) about the harsh reality of where South Africa is today but also offering them hope of a much better tomorrow – which will largely depend on the critical choices they make during this watershed election year for South Africa.

Housing matters, no matter when or where. This volume of collected essays on housing in colonial and postcolonial Africa seeks to elaborate how and why housing is much more than an everyday practice.

The politics of housing unfold in disparate dimensions of time, space and agency. Depending on context, they acquire diverse, often ambivalent, meanings. Housing can be a promise, an unfulfilled dream, a tool of self- and class-assertion, a negotiation process, or a means to achieve other ends. This volume analyzes housing in its multifacetedness, be it a lens to offer insights into complex processes that shape societies; be it a tool of empire to exercise control over private relations of inhabitants; or be it a means to create good, obedient and productive citizens.

Contributions to this volume range from the field of history, to architecture and urban planning, African studies, linguistics, and literature. The individual case studies home in on specific aspects and dimensions of housing and seek to bring them into dialogue with each other. By doing so, the volume aims to add to the debate on studying urban practices and their significance for current social change.

Parcel of Death recounts the little-told life story of Onkgopotse Abram Tiro, the first South African freedom fighter the apartheid regime pursued beyond the country’s borders to assassinate with a parcel bomb.

On 29 April 1972, Tiro made one of the most consequential revolutionary addresses in South African history. Dubbed the Turfloop Testimony, Tiro’s anti-apartheid speech saw him and many of his fellow student activists expelled, igniting a series of strikes in tertiary institutions across the country. By the time he went into exile in Botswana, Tiro was president of the Southern African Student Movement (SASM), permanent organiser of the South African Student Organisation (SASO) and a leading Black Consciousness proponent, hailed by many as the ‘godfather’ of the June 1976 uprisings.

Parcel of Death uses extensive and exclusive interviews to highlight significant influences and periods in Tiro’s life, including the lessons learned from his rural upbringing in Dinokana, Zeerust, the time he spent working on a manganese mine, his role as a teacher and the impact of his faith in shaping his outlook. It is a compelling portrait of Tiro’s story and its lasting significance in South Africa’s history.

‘A biography of Onkgopotse Tiro, who was at once a catalyst and an active change agent in the South African struggle for freedom, is long overdue. For generations to come, this book will be a source of valuable information and inspiration.’ – MOSIBUDI MANGENA

You may have read GG Alcock’s books about the kasi economy; now follow his journey to the dynamic world of KasiNomics and learn about the tribal forces that shaped him.

Born White Zulu Bred is the story of a white child and his brother raised in poverty in a Zulu community in rural South Africa during the apartheid era. His extraordinary parents, Creina and Neil Alcock, gave up lives of comfort and privilege to live and work among the destitute people of Msinga, whose material and social well-being became their mission. But more than that, this is a story about life in South Africa today which, through GG’s unique perspective, explores the huge diversity of the country’s people – from tribal Zulu warriors to sophisticated urban black township entrepreneurs. A journey from the arid wastes of Msinga into the thriving informal economies of urban townships.

GG’s view is that we do not live in a black and white world but in a world of contrast and diversity, one which he wants South Africans, and a world audience, to see for what it is without descending into racial and historical clichés. He takes us through the mazes of township marketplaces, shacks and crowded streets to reveal the proud and dignified world of township entrepreneurs who are transforming South Africa’s economy. This is the world that he moves in today as a successful businessman, still walking those spaces and celebrating the vibrant informal economies that are taking part in the KasiNomic Revolution.

GG’s story is about being truly African, even as a white person, and it draws on the adventures, the cultural challenges, the informal spaces and the future possibilities of South Africa.

At the very dawn of the country’s brave new democracy, Cape Town was at war. Pagad, which started as a community protest action against crime, had mutated into a sinister vigilante group wreaking death and destruction across the city. Between 1996 and 2001, there were more than 400 bombs – most famously at the popular Planet Hollywood restaurant at the V&A Waterfront – and there were countless targeted hits on drug lords and gang bosses.

The police were at their wits end. The new ANC government was alarmed. The citizens of Cape Town were living in fear.

Mark Shaw tells the incredible tale of how the police’s response pulled together former foes – struggle cadres and the apartheid security apparatus – to break the Pagad death squads. It is a story that has never been told in full and was not possible until recently, when many were released from prison or had retired and were finally willing to talk openly about this revealing chapter in South Africa’s recent history.

In this captivating collection of essays, Tinyiko Maluleke invites his readers on a journey that begins with his eventful boyhood in Soweto and his life-changing sojourn in Limpopo. His reflections on the roles of his mother, maternal grandmother and aunts in his upbringing will melt many hearts. In a deep sense of the word, this is a ‘feminist’ book with large sections profiling and promoting the contribution of women in national development.

Included in this memoir is the story of Maluleke’s journey through academia, his rise through the ranks, and the many lessons he learnt along the way. All the while, Maluleke presents his story as a microcosm of the human story of all South Africans, challenging his readers to rethink the history of the country, villages, townships and their own selves.

Maluleke does not pull any punches in the essays where he provides analysis of critical issues facing the country. Deploying solid scholarship, to undergird a variety of literary genres and writing strategies, Maluleke’s book is also a compendium of and an ode to the moments, places and people – celebrated and ordinary – who have shaped and continue to shape his outlook. His profiling of a few fellow university leaders is particularly riveting.

Faces and Phases of Resilience will make you think, laugh, yell and cry. In a way, this book is not merely an individual memoir, it is the memoir of a country, a memoir of a historical epoch and a memoir of a people – it is an invitation to the tragedy, the beauty and the hope that define South Africa.

The book ends, forty-nine chapters later, with a heart-rending essay on the bane of xenophobia, foretelling the death of Maluleke, chillingly titled, ‘The Day I Die’.

Hermann Giliomee, pre-eminent South African historian, dissects the forces that shaped the Afrikaners into an unusual ‘maverick African’ nation.

He analyses long-term forces like the powerful legal position of Afrikaner women, the expanding frontier, and the struggles about race inside the church, along with more recent political history.

Discover the tales behind the ties in Stephen Fry's witty companion to our most distinguished accessory, the perfect gift for the tie-wearer in your life.

'A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life' Oscar Wilde

'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?' 'There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter' P.G. Wodehouse

Every single one of Stephen Fry's ties - whether floral, fluorescent, football themed; striped or spotty, outrageous or simply debonair - tells an intimate tale about a moment in Stephen's life. Inspired by Stephen's hugely popular Instagram posts, this book will feature beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations and photographs to celebrate his expansive collection of man's greatest clothing companion: The Tie, in all its sophisticated glory.

Distinctively funny and offering witty asides, facts and personal stories, this book will make the perfect gift for anyone who has ever worn a tie.

The greatest gift we can give to our children, and the future South Africa, is our own healing.

South Africa may have moved beyond apartheid, but not beyond racial polarisation. Virtually every problem we face in this country is touched by our legacy of systemic racism and the psychological trauma it has caused to people of all races.

Racial healing is not a new, woke, talk shop. It is also not a ‘how-to guide’ for do-gooders. On the contrary, racial healing requires diverse people of all ages to embrace the unique and challenging complexity of racial diversity and to forge a human bridge between multiple opposing truths that can peacefully co-exist.

Only a sober admission of this complexity can help us to heal from the open, festering wound of ongoing racism which has left South Africa with the unenviable distinction of being the most unequal country in the world. A wound not necessarily unique to South Africa, but indeed also the reason behind the violent conflict seen around the world.

Ian Fuhr and co-author Nina de Klerk have created a powerful examination of the deep-rooted causes of continuing racial polarisation in South Africa and suggest a road map for the journey towards racial healing. The book is enhanced by influential collaborators who share their authentic and often emotive perspectives on racial healing.

The Human Bridge is an ambitious but achievable vision of the future. If people are willing to familiarise themselves with each other’s life experiences, own up to their own fears and racial biases, and engage in authentic dialogue, South Africans may once again become an example to the rest of the world.

WITH ESSAYS FROM: Bonang Mohale; Carin Dean; Jonathan Jansen; Leon Wessels; Loretta Feris; Lukhanyo Calata; Max du Preez; Mbali Baduza; Padhma Moodley; Roelf Meyer and Sylvester Chauke.

In The Eight Zulu Kings, well-respected and widely published historian John Laband examines the reigns of the eight Zulu kings from 1816 to the present.

Starting with King Shaka, the renowned founder of the Zulu kingdom, he charts the lives of the kings Dingane, Mpande, Cetshwayo, Dinuzulu, Solomon and Cyprian, to today’s King Goodwill Zwelithini whose role is little more than ceremonial.

In the course of this investigation Laband places the Zulu monarchy in the context of African kingship and tracks and analyses the trajectory of the Zulu kings from independent and powerful pre-colonial African rulers to largely powerless traditionalist figures in post-apartheid South Africa.

A captivating and insightful account of Dr Max Price’s journey at the helm of a major South African university during a period of immense upheaval.

As Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town for two terms from 2008 to 2018, he offers a candid look at the challenges he faced during his time including transformation, rights of artistic expression, institutional culture, clemencies and amnesties, restorative justice and ethical decision, and of course, #FeesMustFall protests – which shook the country's higher education sector to its core.

Drawing on his experiences, Price delves into the complexities of multi-stakeholder decision-making, crisis management, and the importance of values such as academic freedom in an increasingly polarised world. Part memoir, part insider's view of history, and part leadership guide, Statues and Storms is a must-read for anyone interested in higher education, South African history, or the art of leadership during times of crisis.

From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre­serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.

More than 50 years after their breakup, the Beatles are still attracting fans from various generations, all while retaining their original fan base from the 1960s. Why have those first-generation fans continued following the Beatles and are now introducing their grandchildren to the group? Why are current teens affected by the band's music? And perhaps most importantly, how and why do the Beatles continue to resonate with successive generations? Unlike other bands of their era, the Beatles seem permanently frozen in time, having never descended into "nostalgia act" territory. Instead, even after the announcement of the band's breakup in 1970, the group has maintained its cultural and musical relevance. Their timeless quality appeals to younger generations while maintaining the loyalty of older fans. While the Beatles indeed represent a specific time period, their music and words address issues as meaningful today as they were during the Summer of Love: politics, war, sex, drugs, art, and creative liberation. As the first anthology to assess the nature of fan response and the band's enduring appeal, Fandom and the Beatles: The Act You've Known for All These Years defines and explores these unique qualities and the key ways in which this particular pop fusion has inspired such loyalty and multigenerational popularity.

African Doctoral and Masters researchers in Environmental Humanities, in the past 6 years, working in Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Tanzania, Lesotho, Kenya, and DR Congo have consistently and independently come up against a similar story: that struggles in rural Africa are against neoliberal ideas of market-driven development, and neoliberal notions of environmentalism, that have proven fundamentally at odds with both economic and ecological wellbeing. Building on Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC 2013; 275 citations to date), this volume develops an approach that identifies the ways in which environment and society is conceptualized by development “experts”, environmentalists and state officials, and contrasts those conceptualizations with understandings of ecology and wellbeing at ground level.

No comparable work on this topic has been done across ten African countries. Drawing on in-depth field research by African graduates, many of whom have pursued field research in their home languages, the collection makes a sustained and powerful case that local people’s struggles for livelihood have intensified against globalized corporate extractivism across the continent. Individual papers describe struggles over soil, mining, water, seed, pastoralism, energy, technology, forestry, and carbon trading.

Linking African struggles to Latin American rejection of extractivism and South Asian resistance to industrial agriculture and monocropping, the collection will be the first of its kind to make the case that indigenous and other political minorities’ forms of relation to land are vital resources for the protection of African ecological wellbeing, and that they define a contemporary African environmentalism that makes a crucial contribution to rethinking and re-storying climate negotiations, conservation, and development.

It is often remarked that Johannesburg is exceptional as a major city in that it has no large body of water. While it may be true that the city does not boast commercial harbours, busy canals, or navigable rivers, spruits and wetlands saturate the city, and are home to many of its non-human inhabitants. These have largely been overlooked as participants in the urbanization of Johannesburg despite shaping, and being shaped by, the city’s development. This book’s focus on the Jukskei river—in which some of the first gold was found on the Witwatersrand—invites a re-centering of waterways as a device to organize how we think about this baffling city.

The river, after all, runs past many notable features of Johannesburg’s landscape. Starting under Ellis Park (due to a lack of any environmental planning when the city was built), it first sees daylight in the poor urban neighborhood of Bertrams before flowing northwest to Hartbeespoort Dam, on the way passing through Alexandra township, Leeuwkop Prison, and the upscale gated estates of Waterfall, Dainfern, and Steyn City. This volume brings together a variety of activists, community members, journalists, artists, social scientists, and natural scientists to examine the relationship that Johannesburg has to the Jukskei. Centering the river as environmental, urban, socio-economic, political and cultural artefact from which to further understand Johannesburg offers an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human-environment interface. Such an exercise is crucial at a time when the urgency of climate change has made that interface especially volatile, and disciplinary distinctions untenable.

Urban rivers like the Jukskei, even if not especially useful to industry, are important in our collective socio-ecological efforts to live better together, in cities and with nature. This will be the first volume to critically consider the role of the river in the cultural, social, political and scientific life of the city of Johannesburg. As the main economic hub in the country, and indeed one of the main economic hubs on the continent, Johannesburg rightly garners a lot of critical and scholarly attention.

The Jukskei river, which not only runs through the city but emerges from beneath the weight of its concrete, is neglected not only by urban planning and the city’s inhabitants, but by critical theory and research. This book brings together a collection of writings from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, that navigate Johannesburg’s Jukskei.

Alex la Guma was a major twentieth century South African novelist. His first novel, A Walk in the Night, in 1966 brought him instant recognition as a pioneering writer on the African continent. Its ‘startling realism and accurate imagery’ drew high praise from his contemporaries. Wole Soyinka, later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o . The critic and writer, Lewis Nkosi, likewise, compared La Guma’s intense and sombre vision of the individual in society to that of Dostoevsky. La Guma was also an important political figure. As leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation and a communist, he was charged with treason, banned, house arrested and eventually forced into exile. At the time of his death in 1985 he was serving as chief representative of the African National Congress in the Caribbean.

Published on the centenary of Alex La Guma’s birth on 20 February 1925, The Early Writings of Alex La Guma contains a selection of his early work as a journalist and short story writer, before he became a published novelist and was forced into exile. It provides unique cameos of South African life and politics during a turbulent time in the country’s history – the late 1950s and early 1960s, the years around Sharpeville – at the same time giving us insight into the making of a novelist. The ‘hidden’ world of Alex La Guma – material, social, emotional, political and intellectual – at a time when he was developing into a serious writer, is revealed. Many of the themes in his fiction are first encountered and developed in these early newspaper articles, providing useful material for literary scholars seeking to understand the progression of his work.

A reviewer wrote that this book, like Alex La Guma’s novels, captures not only the misery of poverty and oppression in South Africa, but also the rich song of everyday life beneath the surface. It reads easily as fiction and adds significantly to our understanding of popular culture in Cape Town, as well as to the social and political history of the city. When asked what one of his novels was about, La Guma – born and bred in District 6 – replied, ‘Ag, just about the folks back home’. La Guma peels off, as if with a scalpel, the glossy covers of the Cape’s tourist-brochure ‘liberalism’ to reveal the hard realities faced by the majority of its (non-) citizens: This is District Six talking. It is unmistakable – terse, racy, humorous, as convincing as truth.’

La Guma’s insider accounts of contemporary politics also help with the recovery of important aspects of the history of the South African liberation movement.

Systemic racism and sexism caused one of South Africa’s most important writers to disappear from public consciousness. Is it possible to justly restore her historical presence?

Regina Gelana Twala, a Black South African woman who died in 1968 in Swaziland (now Eswatini), was an extraordinarily prolific writer of books, columns, articles, and letters. Yet today Twala’s name is largely unknown. Her literary achievements are forgotten. Her books are unpublished. Her letters languish in the dusty study of a deceased South African academic. Her articles are buried in discontinued publications. Joel Cabrita argues that Twala’s posthumous obscurity has not developed accidentally as she exposes the ways prejudices around race and gender blocked Black African women like Twala from establishing themselves as successful writers.

Drawing upon Twala’s family papers, interviews, newspapers, and archival records from Pretoria, Uppsala, and Los Angeles, Cabrita argues that an entire cast of characters—censorious editors, territorial White academics, apartheid officials, and male African politicians whose politics were at odds with her own—conspired to erase Twala’s legacy. Through her unique documentary output, Twala marked herself as a radical voice on issues of gender, race, and class. The literary gatekeepers of the racist and sexist society of twentieth-century southern Africa clamped down by literally writing her out of the region’s history.

Written Out also scrutinizes the troubled racial politics of African history as a discipline that has been historically dominated by White academics, a situation that many people within the field are now examining critically. Inspired by this recent movement, Cabrita interrogates what it means for her —a White historian based in the Northern Hemisphere—to tell the story of a Black African woman. Far from a laudable “recovery” of an important lost figure, Cabrita acknowledges that her biography inevitably reproduces old dynamics of White scholarly privilege and dominance. Cabrita’s narration of Twala’s career resurrects it but also reminds us that Twala, tragically, is still not the author of her own life story.

Izikhothane―township youth from impoverished backgrounds who engage in mock battles of conspicuous consumption where luxury items are often destroyed―gained notoriety in South Africa in the early 2000s.

Sifiso Mnisi delves into the life of the izikhothane, providing an in-depth account of what it means to be a young man within the ukukhothana (Zulu slang for “boasting”) subculture and showing how their seemingly destructive behavior can be a complex way of asserting their masculinity and demanding recognition in a society that has historically dehumanized them.