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.

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 Her books are unpublished.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.

In January 2003, the Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opéra Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques.

Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. She journeys 100 years into the past, tracing the lives of her ancestors from their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, the war and its aftermath. What emerges is a thrilling and sweeping tale based on true events that shatters her certainties about her family, her country, and herself.

At once a gripping investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and an enthralling portrait of 20th-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, The Postcard tells the story of a family devastated by the Holocaust and yet somehow restored by love and the power of storytelling.

Professor Ntongela Masilela (1948–2020) is recognised as one of South Africa’s most eminent scholars, and his highly respected and meticulous contributions to local and global intellectual discourse, most significantly via his historical archive, offer essential insights into disciplines such as literature, film, arts, and political and intellectual history.

The book comprises essays by Masilela; each of which is prefaced by an introduction by the volume editor. The essays contain Masilela’s most significant writings and illuminate the essence and breadth of his gifted mastery of the aforementioned disciplines; a mastery that he deployed in service of elucidating both the intellectual contributions of others – most notably the members of the New African Movement – and the interconnectedness of people, body politics, events and ideologies across time and space. In this way, the book befittingly presents Masilela as a widely read and travelled scholar, who scoured the national archive to unpack the most intricate aspects of our history and its interconnectedness with the history of the world.

The essays further showcase Masilela’s historico-biographical approach in their exploration of three key periods: the diaspora (exile), the interregnum, and post-apartheid South Africa, as well as offer us an advanced understanding of the locus that drove the works of others, such as Bernard M. Magubane, H.I.E. Dhlomo and Nadine Gordimer.

In so doing, Masilela brings to life both prominent and lesser-known African intellectuals by engaging with their archives in a manner that empowers the reader to appreciate also the value of biographical sketches. His treatment of race, language, culture and indeed literature itself is not just theoretic but verges on the dramatic, and thereby he gives these paths of inquiry both life and contemporaneity. Further, there is an ongoing debate in contemporary Africa about “what is South African literature”, “what is national liberation” and “what are the markers of a successful post-colonial state”. The book will enrich these debates, which are sometimes stylised and conducted without historical context.

The transdisciplinary nature of the book enables it to serve as reference material across various disciplines in the global south and the global north Therefore, itt will be of interest to readers of political and intellectual history, cultural (arts and film) studies, literature, political science and diaspora studies.

First published in Afrikaans as "Als Is Nie Net Swart En Wit Nie, this expanded memoir probes some of the most pivotal issues facing South Africa today: race, ‘othering’, unremembering, identity, gangsterism, addiction, and the process of making meaning of a society that has become unhinged from its moorings.

Malvory Adams is an author and veteran journalist who served as an editorial executive at mainstream newspapers such as City Press, Sowetan, Die Burger, Beeld and Son. At present, he plies his trade as a News Bulletin Writer at Afrikaanse TV-Nuus on SABC2. Away from the newsroom, he is the singer-songwriter MeZZo.

He walks with the reader through a lion-hearted personal lens and through the purgatory of his travelogue, which starts 15 years before his birth in the tiny Eastern Cape hamlet of Breidbach. He dramatically recounts how his German grandfather robbed him of his grandparents. Premised on that epoch-making deed, he takes the reader on a painful journey of uprooting, an agonising coming of age, and the intricacies of navigating cultural belongings and a bloodline concoction. Next, he plummets horrifyingly into a netherworld of alcoholism culminating in a spine-chilling desperate act.

On this treacherous odyssey to restoration and redemption, the veils of darkness lift, and he now lives in a world that is not stark black and white but where the grey mitigates the storms.

Slagtersnek is een van die bekendste name in ons geskiedenis. Met sy grusame assosiasie was dit ‘n magtige propagandamiddel in die politieke ontwikkeling van die Afrikaner. Juis hierdeur het dit egter al gou ‘n volksmite geword waarna herondersoek dringend noodsaaklik geword het. Dit is wat dr. Heese in hierdie boek doen.

Deur deeglike navorsing van die voor- en nageslag van almal wat daarby betrokke was, vorm hy ‘n helder beeld van wat werklik plaasgevind het. Hy toon oortuigend aan dat die Slagtersnek-opstand verkeerd vertolk is. Daar is helde gesien waar geen helde was nie, en dit was juis die bekampers van die opstandelinge, asook die neutrales, wat later die Afrikaner volksbewussyn tydens die Groot Trek bevorder het.

Heese skilder talle kleurryke figure: die bywoners, die ryk patriarge, die sukkelende swerwers, die dwarstrekkers, skoolmeesters en nie-blanke bediendes. Met hierdie boek word ‘n belangrike en oorspronklike bydrae tot ons geskiedenis gemaak.

The first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people.

It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.

This book covers the period of the history of South African schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, it offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately works the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e., Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling, the text seeks to emphasise, cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book.

In telling the story of formal schooling in South Africa, the text, critically, seeks to retrieve the experience of the subjugated to present a wider and larger canvas upon which to describe the process of the making of the South African school. The text works historically with the Dutch East Indian experience up until 1804 when schooling was characterised by its neglect. It shows then how it develops a systematic character through the institutionalisation of a formal system in 1839 and the initiatives of missionaries. It draws the story to a close by looking at how formal systems are established in the colonies, the Boer Republics and the protectorates.

Thematically, the text seeks to thread through the conceits of race and class to show how, contradictorily, they take expression through conflict and struggle. In this conflict and struggle people who are not white (i.e., they do not yet have the racialised labels that apartheid brings in the middle of the 20th century) are systematically marginalised and discriminated against. They work with their discrimination, however, in generative ways by taking opportunity when it arises and exercising political agency.

The book is important because it explains the roots of educational inequality. It shows how inequality is systematically installed in almost every step of the way. For a period, in the middle of the 19th century, attempts were made to forestall this inequality. The text shows how the British administration acceded to eugenicist influences which pushed children of colour out of what were called first-class schools into segregated missionary-run institutions.

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.

A collection of edited life story interviews conducted with 25 current and past residents of Wentworth, Durban, that illustrates the social history of this historically ‘çoloured’ township.

This history from below documents the formation of the townships in the late 1950s and its history through the life experiences of the 25 residents during various periods. The book illustrates the wide diversity of the members of this black South African community in terms of origin, ancestry, class, educational qualifications, political outlook, self-identification, primary concerns, political activism, contribution to society, social impediments suffered, etc. that refute generalisations made about the ‘race’ to which they belong.

The life stories also illustrate the impact of major transformations, such as the advent of democracy, on members of this community.

When Robert McBride was sentenced to death, he turned to the public gallery in court and said: ‘Freedom is just around the corner. I am leaving you at the corner – and you must take that corner to find freedom on the other side.’ As the guard moved in, he raised his fist and shouted: ‘The struggle continues till Babylon falls!’

It was 1987: the time of ‘total onslaught’. The trial of the MK unit that planted the Magoo's bomb on the Durban beachfront dominated the news but few knew the real facts of the brave young people who brought the armed struggle to KwaZulu-Natal.

This is the remarkable story of McBride and his comrades: the substation sabotage spree, rescuing a compatriot from hospital and smuggling him to Botswana, the devastating Why Not and Magoo's car bomb that killed three women, the dramatic trial and McBride’s 1 463 days on Death Row.

Now updated to include McBride’s controversial life after the end of apartheid, this is a thrilling tale of a young South African’s incredible courage, loyalty between friends and falling in love across the race barrier. Today, the struggle continues as McBride fights against corruption and state capture.

In and out of the Maasai Steppe looks at the Maasai women in the Maasai Steppe of Tanzania. The book explores their current plight - threatened by climate change - in the light of colonial history and post-independence history of land seizures. The book documents the struggles of a group of women to develop new livelihood income through their traditional beadwork. Voices of the women are shared as they talk about how it feels to share their husband with many co-wives, and the book examines gender, their beliefs, social hierarchy, social changes and in particular the interface between the Maasai and colonials.

A magisterial history of South Africa, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present.

Leonard Thompson, a leading scholar in southern African history and politics, provides a fresh and penetrating exploration of the country's history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present, focusing primarily on experiences of its black inhabitants.

The Fourth Edition of this classic text brings South Africa's history up to date with a new chapter chronicling the first presidential term of Mbeki and ending with the funeral of Nelson Mandela.

This book explores the impact of brutalist aesthetics on contemporary capitalism, emphasizing the blurring of natural and artificial realms and advocates Afro-diasporic thought as a solution for societal transformation.

Eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism in his latest book to describe society’s current moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

Prof. Fransjohan Pretorius se rubrieke oor die geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika van voor Jan van Riebeeck se landing tot die jongste tye wat in die dagblad Beeld verskyn het.

Maak kennis met die helde en hendsoppers, die skurke en sterre van die land se verlede in kort en boeiende rubrieke wat die leser se geheue sal verfris oor al die grootste momente in ons geskiedenis asook 'n paar minder bekende maar ewe interessante gebeure.

On March 21, 1960, a line of 150 white policemen fired 1344 rounds into a crowd of several thousand people assembled outside a police station, protesting against the Apartheid regime's racist "pass" laws. The gunfire left in its wake sixty-seven dead and one hundred and eighty six wounded. Most of the people who were killed were shot in the back, hit while running away.
The Sharpeville Massacre, as the event has become known, marked the start of armed resistance in South Africa, and prompted worldwide condemnation of South Africa's Apartheid policies. In Sharpeville, Tom Lodge explains how and why the Massacre occurred, looking at the social and political background to the events of March 1960 as well as the long-term consequences of the shootings. Lodge offers a gripping account of the Massacre itself as well as the wider events that accompanied the tragedy, particularly the simultaneous protest in Cape Town which helped prolong the political crisis that developed in the wake of the shootings. Just as important, he sheds light on the long term consequences of these events. He explores how the Sharpeville events affected the perceptions of black and white political leadership in South Africa as well as South Africa's relationship with the rest of the world, and he describes the development of an international "Anti-Apartheid" movement in the wake of the shootings.
In South Africa today, March 21 is a public holiday, Human Rights Day, and for many people, it remains a day of mourning and memorial. This book illuminates this pivotal event in South African history.

In A Short History of South Africa, Gail Nattrass, historian and educator, presents the reader with a brief, general account of South Africa’s history, from the very beginning to the present day, from the first evidence of hominid existence, early settlement pre-and post-European arrival and the warfare through the 18th and 19th centuries that lead to the eventual establishment of modern South Africa.

This readable and thorough account, illustrated with maps and photographs, is a culmination of a lifetime of researching and teaching the broad spectrum of South African history, collecting stories, taking students on tours around the country, and working with distinguished historians.

Nattrass’s passion for her subject shines through, whether she is elucidating the reader on early humans in the cradle of humankind, or the tumultuous twentieth-century processes that shaped the democracy that is South Africa today. A must for all those interested in South Africa, within the country and abroad.

This book of essays written over the last three post-apartheid decades uniquely provides profiles of 104 pan-African figures, mostly from the 1.4 billion-strong African population and its estimated 250 million-strong diaspora in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean. It thus provides a concise profile of the most important figures of Africa and its diaspora.

The profiles also include global Western figures engaging with African issues, assessed from an African perspective. The essays cover, in a multi-disciplinary manner, diverse historical and political figures, technocrats, activists, writers, public intellectuals, musical and film artists, and sporting figures. They acknowledge the continuing legacies and impacts of the twin scourges of slavery and colonialism, but also seek to capture the zeitgeist of the post-apartheid era.

The book argues that the culmination of Africa’s liberation struggles was mirrored by similar battles in the Caribbean as well as the American civil rights movement, with all three involving citizens of global Africa.

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!