In 1973 the trade union movement was both racially and regionally divided. It virtually excluded African workers, and in many cases unions were led by cautious and paternalistic leaders, long schooled in avoiding confrontation with either the state or employers. Then widespread strikes erupted in Durban where hundreds of thousands of workers downed tools in support of wage demands. It was a militant explosion unprecedented since the apartheid government had crushed and outlawed mass demonstrations against segregation and 'whites-only' rule. And it provided the impetus for the next decade and a half of trade union organisation, which succeeded in uniting workers on a largely non-racial basis, dominated by the slogan 'one industry one union'.

Maverick Insider is an anecdotal, insider's account of the transformation during this period in the textile, clothing and leather worker sectors. It focuses on the outlooks of leadership groups in different parts of that industry and their efforts to influence the nature of the amalgamation of six unions to form the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (SACTWU), one of the three largest unions of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It traces the interaction between union leadership and both political parties and community organisations dedicated to making the country ungovernable, as well as those who were determined to stamp out such calls. It details struggles to unite workers across political divides in the same union organisation and to assert an independent working-class point of view in a period of growing African nationalism. It details the traumatic events on the road to the so-called peaceful miracle that created a rainbow nation but left 22 000 South Africans dead in the process.

And it is the story of a team of people who set out to change the world and formed an unshakeable bond in the process.

The perfect match. Or so she thinks. Her warmth and empathy. His charisma and ambition. Yet, Cathy feels safer teaching battle-scarred gangsters in a prison classroom than at home with her own partner.

By day she walks on eggshells. At night she sleeps on the backseat of her car. Her safe place is an all-night roadhouse; her best friend, her journal. The slow boil intensifies until, one day, Cathy finds her grandmother’s armoire smashed to pieces in her bedroom, a hammer on the floor, her life in splinters beside it.

Part memoir, part inspiration, Boiling A Frog Slowly is unflinching in its confrontation of abuse and utterly courageous in its portrayal of redemption.

Navigating motherhood from the age of 18, Kim Stephens shelved her inner journo and embraced a life of media sales and sports marketing, working with some of the biggest sports brands globally, and locally, whilst pursuing her own ultra-running ambitions.

Arguing vehemently against the possibility that she was running from her own truth, Covid-19 wiped out Kim’s possibilities for continued escape. After three children, two divorces and a gradual sexual awakening, Kim found herself at 40-something virtually unemployed, with all the time in the world to write, sip gin and study a general response to one of the world’s most draconian lockdowns. Her humorous observations of middle-class South African behaviour through the various levels of lockdown earned her a certain notoriety and a degree of viral success, and with that the courage to put it all into a book.

Hold the Line tells the story of teenage pregnancy, the situational blindness of white South Africa, the disappointment of divorce and the deep joy found through true awakening. Stitched together with the lockdown writing that Kim penned for a growing base of followers, she shares a more in-depth life story with her usual candid self-deprecation.

Written to rattle a few truths from within its readers, Hold the Line ends ironically as the world begins to follow a potential third World War via TikTok.

Despite two-and-a-half decades of black majority rule after 1994, much of South African higher education in the area of humanities continues to embrace European models and paradigms. This is despite concepts such as Africanisation, indigenisation and decolonisation of the curriculum having become buzzwords, especially after the #MustFall campaigns, student-led protests from 2015.

This book argues that, beyond the use of internally constructed strategies to foster curriculum transformation in South Africa, it is important to draw lessons from the curriculum transformation efforts of other African countries and African-American studies in the United States (US).

The end of colonialism in Africa from the 1950s marked the most important era in curriculum transformation efforts in African higher education, evident in the rise of leading decolonial schools: the Ibadan School of History, the Dar es Salaam School of Political Economy and the Dakar School of Culture. These centres used rigorous research methods such as nationalist historiography and oral sources to challenge Eurocentric epistemologies. African-American studies emerged in the US from the 1920s to debunk notions of white superiority and challenge racist ideas and structures in international relations. The two important schools of this scholarship were the Atlanta School of Sociology and the Howard School of International Affairs.

Holding My Breath is a candid, heart-breaking and very funny memoir of life in one of Johannesburg’s busiest emergency rooms. Biccard’s warmth and humanity shine through the often harrowing tale, creating an unputdownable, uplifting and inspiring book.

The first customer today reports that, the previous night, his right nipple had moved away from its usual location. He noticed its absence when he looked in the mirror and later found it in his armpit.

‘Wow,’ I say with a slight frown. I have never heard of a migrating nipple before. ‘Let’s have a look.’ I slide the door shut and motion to him to pull his T-shirt off.

‘Oh, it has moved back now,’ he says.

George Bizos is one of a distinguished group of human rights lawyers who in the dark days of apartheid sought to uncover the state's role in eliminating its opponents.

Some, like Biko, Timol and Aggett, were arrested and died in detention, while others, like Matthew Goniwe, were abducted and killed. As counsel for the families of the deceased, George Bizos was centrally involved in many of the inquests following these high-profile deaths.

He is thus well placed to tell the story of the great courtroom dramas in which, with devastating skill, he and his colleagues pared away the tissue of lies protecting the security forces and the state functionaries—only to be rewarded with the invariable finding that there was 'no one to blame'.

A bold, urgent appeal from the acclaimed columnist and political commentator, addressing one of the most important issues of our time.

In Peter Beinart’s view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, Beinart argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the question: What does it mean to be a Jew?

Beinart imagines an alternate narrative, which would draw on other nations’ efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish tradition. A story in which Israeli Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One that recognizes the danger of venerating states at the expense of human life.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is a provocative argument that will expand and inform one of the defining conversations of our time. It is a book that only Peter Beinart could write: a passionate yet measured work that brings together his personal experience, his commanding grasp of history, his keen understanding of political and moral dilemmas, and a clear vision for the future.

Black tax is not so much about money as it is about boundaries: there is a mental and emotional price we pay when dealing with the complex issues relating to black tax and its effect on our relationships with our families and with money itself. Helping others is commendable, but where does one draw the line between healthy helping and standing in the way of the financial independence of those on the receiving end of black tax?

In ten relatable stories that range from absent fathers to siblings’ expectations, self-leadership coach Ndumi Hadebe explores the boundary issues that lead to financial and emotional burdens for those struggling with black tax, as well as the normalised behaviours, notions and societal constructs that will keep you spinning in the washing machine of black tax if you don’t explore solutions to it.

Drawing on particular themes in each story, Ndumi will show you how to tackle your black tax in a way that is peaceful and non-threatening to your relationships with loved ones. She also opens up about her own struggle with boundaries and reflects on the ways that this has impacted her life.

Handle Black Tax Like a Pro is a helpful guide that will provide you with a roadmap to stronger relatiovnships, better finances and overall well-being.

The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium and Oxycontin, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis-an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.

In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of 21st century greed.

Two long-time friends share an intimate and urgent conversation about life, music and their enduring love of America, with all its challenges and contradictions, in this stunningly-produced expansion of their ground-breaking Higher Ground podcast, featuring more than 350 photographs, exclusive bonus content, and never-before-seen archival material.

Renegades: Born in the USA is a candid, revealing, and entertaining dialogue between President Barack Obama and legendary musician Bruce Springsteen that explores everything from their origin stories and career-defining moments to their country's polarized politics and the growing distance between the American Dream and the American reality. Filled with full-colour photographs and rare archival material, it is a compelling and beautifully illustrated portrait of two outsiders - one Black and one white - looking for a way to connect their unconventional searches for meaning, identity, and community with the American story itself.

It includes:

• Original introductions by President Obama and Bruce Springsteen
• Exclusive new material from the Renegades podcast recording sessions
• Obama's never-before-seen annotated speeches, including his "Remarks at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches
• Springsteen's handwritten lyrics for songs spanning his 50-year-long career
• Rare and exclusive photographs from the authors' personal archives
• Historical photographs and documents that provide rich visual context for their conversation.

Obama and Springsteen discuss marriage and fatherhood, race and masculinity, the lure of the open road and the call back to home. They also compare notes on their favourite protest songs, the most inspiring American heroes of all time, and more. Along the way, they reveal their passion for - and the occasional toll of - telling a bigger, truer story about America throughout their careers, and explore how their fractured country might begin to find its way back toward unity.

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios.

Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected.

A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

Lebogang Seale has written a personal and poignant account of the impact of South Africa’s failing and flailing land reform policy on ordinary people desperate for restorative justice.

One Hundred Years of Dispossession shows not only that land reform in South Africa is a criminal failure and monumental disappointment, but more than that, it is a betrayal that punishes the affected communities whose quest for justice remains denied.

Die daggaplant (Cannabis sativa) word al vir duisende jare gebruik. Dit is, inderdaad, ’n baie nuttige plant om materiaal en toue mee te vervaardig. Dit is egter die bekendste vir die psigotropiese effekte van dagga se aktiewe bestanddeel, tetrahidrokannabinol (THC).

Die kwessie oor of dagga verslawend is, is nog nie heeltemal duidelik nie. Baie navorsing word gedoen om korrekte en interessante inligting vir gebruikers, hul naasbestaandes, handelaars en almal wat oor dagga wonder, beskikbaar te stel.

Hierdie handleiding bring die leser op datum met alles wat ons weet aangaande dagga. Slegs wanneer al die feite op die tafel is, is dit sinvol om ’n opinie oor hierdie wonderlike plant te waag.

Reflecting Rogue is the much anticipated and brilliant collection of experimental autobiographical essays on power, pleasure and South African culture by Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, author of the bestelling Rape: A South African Nightmare.

In her most personal book to date, written from classic Gqola anti-racist, feminist perspectives, Reflecting Rogue delivers fourteen essays of deliciously incisive brain food, all extremely accessible to a general critical readership, without sacrificing intellectual rigour.

Zamantungwa Khumalo is a rising star on the South African property scene. An award-winning media and content specialist, she is also a property entrepreneur who bought her first properties at age 27. Now, she wants other people to follow in her footsteps, climbing the property ladder on their way to building wealth and security.

All her passion and expertise is concentrated in this volume, which covers a range of topics vital to property ownership. She also includes interviews with leading property industry experts like Gil Sperling, Michelle Dickens, and Silindile Leseyane who is the chairperson of Sakhisizwe Property Stokvel.

This book is aimed at helping a wide range of people – women, young professionals, and also men who want to buy property but don’t quite know how to go about it – to take that first step.

As she says in her introduction: ‘My hope is that this book will help to make your property dreams come true.’

Amid evictions, raids, killings, the drug trade, and fire, inner-city Johannesburg residents seek safety and a home. A grandmother struggles to keep her granddaughter as she is torn away from her. A mother seeks healing in the wake of her son’s murder. And displaced by a city’s drive for urban regeneration, a group of blind migrants try to carve out an existence.

The Blinded City recounts the history of inner-city Johannesburg from 2010 to 2019, primarily from the perspectives of the unlawful occupiers of spaces known as hijacked buildings, bad buildings or dark buildings. Tens of thousands of residents, both South African and foreign national, live in these buildings in dire conditions. This book tells the story of these sites, and the court cases around them, ones that strike at the centre of who has the right to occupy the city.

In February 2010, while Johannesburg prepared for the FIFA World Cup, the South Gauteng High Court ordered the eviction of the unlawful occupiers of an abandoned carpet factory on Saratoga Avenue and that the city’s Metropolitan Municipality provide temporary emergency accommodation for the evicted. The case, which became known as Blue Moonlight and went to the Constitutional Court, catalysed a decade of struggles over housing and eviction in Johannesburg.

The Blinded City chronicles this case, among others, and the aftermath – a tumultuous period in the city characterised by recurrent dispossessions, police and immigration operations, outbursts of xenophobic violence, and political and legal change. All through the decade, there is the backdrop of successive mayors and their attempts to ‘clean up’ the city, and the struggles of residents and urban housing activists for homes and a better life.

The interwoven narratives present a compelling mosaic of life in post-apartheid Johannesburg, one of the globe’s most infamous and vital cities.

When Chris Hani, leader of the South African Communist Party and heir apparent to Nelson Mandela, was brutally slain in his driveway in April 1993, he left a shocked and grieving South Africa on the precipice of civil war. But to 12-year-old Lindiwe, it was the love of her life, her daddy, who had been shockingly ripped from her life. In this intimate and brutally honest memoir, 36-year-old Lindiwe remembers the years she shared with her loving father, and the toll that his untimely death took on the Hani family. She lays family skeletons bare and brings to the fore her own downward spiral into cocaine and alcohol addiction, a desperate attempt to avoid the pain of his brutal parting.

While the nation continued to revere and honour her father’s legacy, for Lindiwe, being Chris Hani’s daughter became an increasingly heavy burden to bear.

"For as long as I can remember, I’d grown up feeling that I was the daughter of Chris Hani and that I was useless. My father was such a huge figure, such an icon to so many people, it felt like I could never be anything close to what he achieved – so why even try? Of course my addiction to booze and cocaine just made me feel my worthlessness even more".

In a stunning turnaround, she faces her demons, not just those that haunted her through her addiction, but, with the courage that comes with sobriety, she comes face to face with her father’s two killers – Janus Walus, still incarcerated, and Clive Derby Lewis, released in 2015 on medical parole. In a breathtaking twist of humanity, while searching for the truth behind her father’s assassination, Lindiwe Hani ultimately makes peace with herself and honours her father’s gigantic spirit.

The Struggle Continues is a “searing, heartfelt, brutally honest account of the turbulent modern history of Zimbabwe” (Douglas Rogers author of The Last Resort).

This autobiographical political history since the 1950s deals with an era of great turbulence from the perspective a person who has been at the centre of the great Zimbabwean drama for over 30 years, David Coltart.

It is set to be the most authoritative book to date of the last sixty years of Zimbabwe’s history, described by the doyenne of Southern African journalists, Peta Thornycroft, as “a masterpiece”: from the obstinate racism of Ian Smith that provoked Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, to the civil war of the 1970s, the Gukurahundi genocide of the 1980s, the land invasions of the 2000s, Robert Mugabe’s Murambatsvina war on poor urban dwellers in 2005, and the struggles waged by the MDC in confronting a brutal regime.

In South African higher education, the images of dysfunction are everywhere. Student protests. Violence. Police presence. Rubber or real bullets. Class disruptions. Burning tyres. Damaged buildings. Injury and sometimes death. Reports of wholesale corruption. Year after year, often in the same set of universities; the problem of routine instability seems insoluble. The financial, academic and reputational costs of ongoing dysfunction are high, especially for those universities caught-up in the never-ending struggle to overcome apartheid legacies. Any number of explanations have been ventured, including a lack of resources, shortage of capacity, rural location, corrupt officials, and endemic conflict. Corrupted takes a deeper look at dysfunction in an attempt to unravel the root causes in a sample of South African universities.

At the heart of the problem lies the vexed issue of resources or, more pertinently, the relationship between resources and power: who gets what, and why? Whatever else it aspires to be - commonly, a place of teaching, learning, research and public duty - a university in an impoverished community is also a rich concentration of resources around which corrupt staff, students and those outside of campus all vie for access.

Taking a political economic approach, Jonathan Jansen describes the daily struggle for institutional resources and offers accessible, sensible insights. He argues that the problem won't be solved through investments in 'capacity building' alone because the combination of institutional capacity and institutional integrity contributes to serial instability in universities. Rather, durable solutions would include the depoliticisation of university councils and appointments of academics with integrity and capacity to manage and lead these fragile institutions.

This groundbreaking and long overdue study will offer a promising way forward for universities to better serve their communities and the country more broadly.

"This book is not an analysis of South Africa’s problems. It is an outline of what we must change to have the South Africa of our dreams. In these pages, I challenge myself and all those who are willing to take a chance to pursue a higher ideal, something bigger than any individual, a belief that we can be the stewards of our own destiny. This is a manifesto."

For millions of South Africans, the promise of democracy, a promise our Constitution attempts to set out in its preamble, will not be realised in their lifetime. Some who are yet to be born will live and die poor and marginalised because their country was not ready to provide the tools that would help them to make their lives meaningful, healthy and prosperous. This situation is no accident. While the structural conditions that created the initial inequalities are a result of colonialism and apartheid, the worsening of this condition after 2010 is the result of political negligence, incompetence and rampant corruption borne out of a deep disconnection between the political elites and the real needs of the people. South Africa is in urgent need of a comprehensive overhaul of its political and state institutions, its social structures and institutions as well as its economy and policies.

Manifesto presents a challenge to the professional class, black and white – who should know that turning the country around will take much more than good intentions – to urgently return to public life. They are key to moving South Africa towards modern democratic politics and can help to grow its economy to fit in and thrive in a rapidly evolving world. South Africa will get nowhere if the most able continue to be on the periphery of politics.

Instead, we must adopt a different mindset and take on a new generational mission to accept the responsibility of leadership so that South Africa can finally have the future it has been waiting for the ANC to deliver.

There has been a lot of furore in the United States about Critical Race Theory (CRT). Opponents to it claim that it has saturated society at different levels, including the alleged indoctrination of school children and the poisoning of the media and public life. The assertion is that it is divisive and racist towards white people. It is sometimes referred to derisively in the shorthand ‘woke’. This panic has now reached our shores. Critical whiteness studies is an offshoot of CRT that Thandiwe Ntshinga believes is desperately needed in South Africa.

She pokes holes in the belief that leaving whiteness undisturbed for analysis creates justice and normalcy. Instead, she says perpetually studying every other identity can only create the assumption that they are perpetually the problem. By design.

The title of this book comes from one of the first comments she received on Tiktok when discussing her findings and research.

The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is the policy blueprint of the governing ANC/SACP alliance, who have been implementing it in different spheres for more than two decades. It is intended to provide ‘the most direct route’ to a socialist South Africa and is the key to understanding events in the country since the 1994 transition.

Although many important steps towards Expropriation without Compensation and other NDR objectives have already been taken or are well in train, most South Africans have never been informed about the NDR and its destructive goals.

With growth stalling, joblessness at crisis levels, and governance unravelling, people cannot fathom why the ANC does not implement meaningful reforms. Understand the NDR, however, and its underlying priorities become apparent.

If South Africa’s mainly capitalist economy was thriving, with high growth, low unemployment, and rising living standards, the ANC could not justify expanding state ownership or control. By contrast, with joblessness and destitution at unprecedented levels, the call for state provision and control becomes far more compelling – and even patently harmful policies such as Expropriation without Compensation seem justifiable.

Written in clear and simple language, this book provides an indispensable primer on the NDR and its crucial role in the countdown to socialism in South Africa.

A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low income populations. The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity.

Kasi is the South African term for the township – a teeming conurbation of homes and businesses, entertainment venues and social meeting places. GG Alcock uses the term KasiNomics to describe the informal sectors of Africa, whether they are in the township, a rural marketplace, at a taxi rank or on a pavement in the shadow of skyscrapers. Brought up in a rural Zulu community, GG has learnt and shares the lessons of African culture, language, stick fighting, lifestyle and tribal politics, along with shared poverty and community, which have prepared him for accessing the great informal marketplaces of Africa. He is uniquely placed to uncover the extraordinary stories of kasi businesses which not only survive but excel, revealing a revolutionary entrepreneurship which is mostly invisible to the formal sector.

KasiNomic Revolution is a story of kasi entrepreneurs on one side and, on the other, of great corporate successes and failures in the informal community. KasiNomic Revolution is at once a business book, and at the same time a deeply human book about the people and lives of rural and urban informal societies.

KasiNomic Revolution is about the lessons of marketing, distribution, culture and modernity in an informal African world.

Herman Mashaba is a self-made entrepreneur who started his business Black Like Me in the dark days of apartheid in South Africa. He has told the story of his journey from the poverty of Hammanskraal to the comfort of a successful business in his book Black Like You.

When Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president in 1994, Mashaba thought his struggle for personal and economic freedom was over, the battle was won. Twenty-one years later, he has had to question that assumption as his hard won freedoms are eroded and economic controls tighten. Mashaba is committed to freeing South Africans from poverty.

In this book Mashaba outlines his crusade for economic freedom for all South Africans – through a firm commitment to capitalist principles. He describes the changes in his political affiliations and maps out the route South Africa needs to follow to escape entrenched unemployment and poverty.

Sixteen-year-old Engela flees to Bloemfontein because the leader of the Satanic Group 13 wishes to kill her. Her path crosses with Pieter, a friend of her brother’s, who turns her over to the owner of a brothel in return for money he owes him.

After a desperate and impoverished childhood Engela, as a rebellious teenager, becomes mixed up with Satanism, alcohol and drugs and is eventually kept as a sex slave. Her only wish is to escape, but how? Every night the club’s doors are shuttered. Her final shot at freedom is the young student Jacques who works in the club’s reception area. But then he also disappears from the scene following a mysterious accident in the Drakensberg . . .

In the second part of the book Elanie shares with the reader her awful experiences. She relates how she learned to cope with her feelings of despair, loneliness, pain and humiliation from a Christian perspective. She reaches out to other former victims of sex trafficking and encourages them to open their hearts in order to achieve emotional healing. She talks about the power of forgiveness and acceptance, and also offers essential practical advice for parents and their children.