Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has seen an outpouring of longform, narrative journalism and creative nonfiction – genres in which some of the country’s finest writers have tried to make sense of a complex and changing society. This brand new, one-of-a-kind anthology collects some of the best nonfiction published since the end of apartheid, carefully selected and introduced by editors Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle.

From the underworld of zama-zama goldminers to the tragicomic closure of a Cape Town Zoo, from stick fighting to punk rock, game lodges to fruit farms, cricket pitches to mermaids, The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction assembles a range of true stories that are often more far-fetched, and more compelling, than any fiction.

Creative nonfiction in South Africa has often been found at the margins of our media – in zines, journals, now defunct magazines and personal blogs. It is a kind of writing that has, in general, not made much financial sense – more a medium for those obsessed with pursuing a single story over months or years. In The Interpreters, the editors have combed through 30 years of post-apartheid writing to produce a collection that combines preeminent names with lesser known but no less immersive and powerful works of nonfiction – voices that deserve to be read and that represent fresh interpretations of a nation’s history.

Featuring J. M. Coetzee • Kimon de Greef • William Dicey • Alexandra Dodd • Madeleine Fullard • Mark Gevisser • Anna Hartford • Anton Harber • Michiel Heyns • Anton Kannemeyer • Bongani Kona • Rustum Kozain • Antjie Krog • Alastair Laird • Adrian Leftwich • Lidudumalingani • Bongani Madondo • Rian Malan • Zanele Mji • Mogorosi Motshumi • Nosisi Mpolweni • Julie Nxadi • Njabulo Ndebele • Lindokuhle Nkosi • Sean O’Toole • Kopano Ratele • Warren Raysdorf • Srila Roy • Lin Sampson • Kwanele Sosibo • Jonny Steinberg • Niren Tolsi • Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon • Roger Young • Percy Zvomuya

The animals in this landmark book – elephants, hippos, okapi, lions, jackals, cows, sheep, horses, white ants, quagga, Nazi cattle, police dogs and baboons – are chosen strategically to highlight different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research are brought together in an astonishing book, one that takes animals seriously.

The possibility of our shared future pivots on a reckoning with our shared pasts. This pioneering work shows what human-animal history can do, not only to help us better understand our place in the world, but to make our world – however slightly – a better place.

The book is the first of its kind as it combines cultural history with natural, as the historical context of the tidal pools are brought to life. Through the lense of South Africa’s history, this insight allows adventurers to really enhance their experience of the tidal pools with a deeper understanding of their significance.

The gorgeous photo-filled book contains information on how to get to the best pools, accessibility, facilities, swimmability, what to expect when you get there, things to do nearby and safety. Along with the stunning photography, unique and detailed maps of the areas are included. It includes tips on where is best for families, picnics, romantic dips, sunsets, sunrises, training and learning to swim.

There are black and white ink illustrations of the marine life found in the intertidal zone, and their relation to the tidal pools. The health benefits of cold-water immersion and the necessary safety, gear and guidance to safe swimming in cold water is valuable for the rising trend of cold-water swimmers.

In 1856, a teenage girl led 40000 to their deaths in the Eastern Cape.

When Treive Nicholas arrived in the 1980s to teach, he was captivated by the Wild Coast. Researching its history, he explores the Cattle Killing of 1856-1857. Was Nongqawuse a deceiver or a liberation leader?

Treive's quest spans continents, from South Africa to England, ending with a shocking revelation closer to home than expected.

The book selects some past events and experiences, national and international, and wonders what lessons were missed, learnt, or are yet to be learnt from them.

Tragedies happen again and again because we fail to learn from the past. The past is rich with valuable lessons – rich pickings. The reader is taken back into the past in search of some of those lessons, many of which, regrettably, we failed – and continue failing – to learn. As we dig into the past for those rich pickings, there will be moments to laugh, cry or even weep; but that is exactly how lessons are learnt in life.

Other similar incidents learnt from, both abroad and at home, relate to the author’s own experiences in South Africa, including as a Judge who heard amnesty applications as a member of the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The book hopes to show that capacity for evil is not peculiar to any nation or race; it also discusses the dangers of tribalism.

The chapter ‘Beyond the Frontiers’ takes the reader into the rest of Africa. A lot is revealed, including divisions the author witnessed – while serving as an AU judge based in Tanzania – within the AU along the languages of, ironically, colonial masters; also referenced is the sorry state of human rights in Africa. Have we seized the opportunity to learn all the valuable lessons which that great teacher, ‘The Past’, offered?

The author leaves it to readers to make their own final judgement after reading the book as to whether, at the individual and collective levels, we have learnt those lessons and taken them to heart for the good of our individual and collective destiny.

Set amid the civil rights movement, this is the true story of NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America's space program.

Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as 'Human Computers', calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these 'coloured computers' used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Moving from World War II through NASA's golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women's rights movement, 'Hidden Figures' interweaves a rich history of mankind's greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.

With prose like jazz – thrilling, mysterious, playful – Oyama Mabandla excavates the values that created a steady flow of pioneering South Africans under impossible conditions.

Can these values, maligned in 1994, be recaptured and set South Africa on its best trajectory?

This close media study considers how, squeezed in the moral vice of past and present, Afrikaners look in a mirror that reflects only a beautiful people.

It is an image of upstanding, hard-working citizens. To hold on to that image requires blinkers, sleights of hand and contortion. Above all, it requires an inversion of the liberation narrative in which the wretched of South Africa are the historical oppressors, besieged in their language, their homes, their jobs.

They are the new `grievables', an identity that requires intricate moral manoeuvres, and elision as much of the past as of transformation.

What happens when death becomes the ultimate marker of one’s commitment to one’s freedom? What happens when the opposite of freedom is not unfreedom but death, not slavery but mortality? How are we to think of the right to life when a political demand for dignity and honor might be more important than life itself?

Dying for Freedom explores these questions by drawing on archival evidence from South Africa to show how death and conflicting notions of sacrifice dominated the struggle for political equality in that country. This political investment in death as a marker of commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle encouraged a masculinist style of politics in which the fight for freedom was seen and understood by many activists as a struggle literally for manhood. This investment generated a notion of political sacrifice so absolute that anything less than death was rendered suspect. More importantly, it resulted in a hierarchy of death whereby some deaths were more important than others, and where some deaths could be mourned and others not.

This highly original account of the necropolitics of the liberation struggle will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to anyone interested in South Africa.

What is it like to be born dirt-poor in South Africa? Clinton Chauke knows, having been raised alongside his two sisters in a remote village bordering the Kruger National Park and a squatter camp outside Pretoria. Clinton is a young village boy when awareness dawns of how poor his family really is: there’s no theft in the village because there’s absolutely nothing to steal. But fire destroys the family hut, and they decide to move back to the city. There he is forced to confront the rough-and-tumble of urban life as a ‘bumpkin’.

He is Venda, whereas most of his classmates speak Zulu or Tswana and he has to face their ridicule while trying to pick up two or more languages as fast as possible. With great self-awareness, Clinton negotiates the pitfalls and lifelines of a young life: crime and drugs, football, religion, friendship, school, circumcision and, ultimately, becoming a man. Throughout it all, he displays determination as well as a self-deprecating humour that will keep you turning the pages till the end.

Clinton’s story is one that will give you hope that even in a sea of poverty there are those that refuse to give up and, ultimately, succeed.

Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi is one of South Africa’s most famous novels.

First published in 1930, it is the first full-length novel by a black South African writer, and is widely read and studied in South African schools, colleges and universities. It has been translated into a number of different languages. Written over 30 years before Chinua Achebe’s famous Things Fall Apart, Mhudi is a pioneering African novel too, anticipating many of the themes with which Achebe and other writers from the African continent were concerned.

Mhudi has had a complicated history. Critics have been divided in their views, and there was a delay of ten years between the time Plaatje wrote the book and when it was published. A century on from when it was written, the time is now right to both celebrate its composition and to assess its meanings and legacy.

In this book, a distinguished cast of contributors explore the circumstances in which Mhudi was both written and published, what the critics have made of it, why it remains so relevant today. Chapters look at the eponymous feminist heroine of the novel and what she symbolizes, the role of history and oral tradition, the contentious question of language, the linguistic and stylistic choices that Plaatje made. In keeping with Mhudi’s capacity to inspire, this book also includes a poem and short story, specially written in order to pay tribute to both the book and its author.

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

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

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

Too much of South Africa’s history has been lost and suppressed, leaving a void for many South Africans. Sylvia Vollenhoven brings together her life and that of a long-ago ancestor, Kabbo, a respected Khoisan storyteller.

She writes of her experience as being “too black” for her coloured schoolmates, working as one of the early female journalists in the misogynistic environment of the 70s, and of the constant impact on her life of her background – including her ancestors.

In what will surely become a classic of South African non-fiction, Led by Shepherds begins with twelve-year-old Jeffrey Rakabe leaving his village to attend an initiation ceremony, believing it to be the key to his manhood. But the weeks-long rite of passage in the mountains is a far cry from the adventure he’d imagined.

Years later, as a student, Rakabe discovers the nurturing world of books and thrives within the hush of the Johannesburg Public Library.

The presence of caring women in his life, from his concerned mother and supportive partner to a librarian who feeds his intellectual curiosity with a steady supply of literature, spur Rakabe to investigate the possible links between the koma ritual, awash with misogynistic language, and gender-based violence in SA.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Led by Shepherds is a moving, vital and controversial book and Jeffrey Rakabe a brave voice for a new generation.