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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Anelia Schutte grew up in Knysna – a beautiful town on the coast of South Africa, centred around a picturesque lagoon and popular with tourists. But there was another side to Knysna that those tourists never saw. In the hills surrounding the town with its exclusively white population lay the townships and squatter camps where the coloured and black people were forced to live. Most white children would never go to the other side of the hill, but Anelia did. Her earliest memories are of being the only white girl at a crèche for black children that her mother, Owéna, set up in the 1980s as a social worker serving the black community. Thirty years on, Anelia, now living in London, yearns to find out more about her mother’s work, and to understand the political unrest that clouded South Africa at the time. She returns to Knysna to find the truth about the town she grew up in, from the stories and memories of the people who were there. For The People is an exploration of apartheid South Africa through the eyes of Owéna – a white woman who worked tirelessly for the black people of Knysna and found herself swept up in their struggle. They called her Nobantu: ‘for the people'.
Wat dryf ’n beeldskone jong ma van drie daartoe om haar man wreed te laat vermoor? Waarom wou Suretha Brits só graag van haar Leon ontslae raak? Danksy inligting uit die binnekring van vriende, familie en mense ná aan die polisie-ondersoek, sit die joernalis Charné Kemp die stukkies van die legkaart bymekaar en vertel die volle verhaal van die opspraakwekkende huurmoord op die geliefde Pofadder-hotelbaas. ’n Boeiende ware misdaadverhaal wat draai om geld, diamante, Krugerrande, seks en verraad.
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.
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.
Magenge, We Need to Talk is bestselling author Melusi Tshabalala's call to men to open up, talk more, listen more and change. The book is built around a series of conversations that Melusi's been having with his male friends, his Magenge, over the years. These round tables navigate the shitshow known as "adulting", through the lens of 40somethingyearold black men, trying to make sense of their place in the world. These intimate and often humorous convos embrace black fatherhood, black love, gender relations, gender based violence, racism, traditions and religion, hosted by the intrepid Melusi and his unique take on the wonky world black men find themselves in. “We need to talk." Is there a more terrifying opening statement to any engagement? Whether it’s a wife, a girlfriend, your banker or lawyer – usually nothing good follows that suggestion."Now, if you have both a wife and a girlfriend," says the author, "we definitely need to talk."
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.
A dozen years in the making, The Inheritors weaves together the stories of three ordinary South Africans over five tumultuous decades in a sweeping and exquisite look at what really happens when a country resolves to end white supremacy. Dipuo grew up on the south side of a mine dump that segregated Johannesburg’s black townships from the white-only city. Some nights, she hiked to the top. To a South African teenager in the 1980s—even an anti-apartheid activist like Dipuo—the divide that separated her from the glittering lights on the other side appeared eternal. But in 1994, the world’s last explicit racial segregationist regime collapsed to make way for something unprecedented. With penetrating psychological insight, intimate reporting, and bewitching prose, The Inheritors tells the story of a country in the throes of a great reckoning. Through the lives of Dipuo, her daughter Malaika, and Christo—one of the last white South Africans drafted to fight for the apartheid regime—award-winning journalist Eve Fairbanks probes what happens when people once locked into certain kinds of power relations find their status shifting. Observing subtle truths about race and power that extend well beyond national borders, she explores questions that preoccupy so many of us today: How can we let go of our pasts, as individuals and as countries? How should historical debts be paid? And how can a person live an honorable life in a society that—for better or worse—they no longer recognize?
How were whites implicated in and shaped by apartheid culture and society, and how did they contribute to it? In Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, historian Neil Roos traces the lives of ordinary white people in South Africa during the apartheid years, beginning in 1948 when the National Party swept into power on the back of its catchall apartheid slogan. Drawing on his own family’s story and others, Roos explores how working-class white peoples frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of apartheid society. This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.
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.
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.
Renowned South African photographer Ranjith Kally captured iconic scenes throughout his career, such as his portrait Umkumbane, which has come to symbolise the shimmering jazz age of African townships in the 1950s. When Miriam Makeba returned to Maseru, Lesotho, for a concert for black South Africans at the height of apartheid, Ranjith, too ventured to Lesotho and returned home with a remarkable image of an exiled singer poised between joy and heartbreak. And in a series of unflinching portraits, he documented with probity the horror of the forced removals in Natal. As one of our country’s most prolific photojournalists, Ranjith’s pictures provide us with a glimpse into the tensions of the past and the events that shaped our future.
These Potatoes Look Like Humans offers a unique understanding of the intersection between land, labour, dispossession and violence experienced by Black South Africans from the apartheid period to the present. In this ground-breaking book, uMbuso weNkosi criticises the historical framing of this debate within narrow materialist and legalistic arguments. His assertion is that for most Black South Africans the meaning of land cannot be separated from one’s spiritual and ancestral connection to it, and this results in him seeing the dispossession of land in South Africa with a perspective not yet explored. Nkosi takes as his starting point the historic 1959 potato boycott in South Africa, which came about as a result of startling rumours that potatoes dug out of the soil from the farms in the Bethal district of Mpumalanga were in fact human heads. Journalists such as Ruth First and Henry Nxumalo went to Bethal to uncover these stories and revealed horrific accounts of abuse and routine killings of farmworkers by white Afrikaners. The workers were disenfranchised Black people who were forced to work on these farms for alleged ‘crimes’ against National Party state laws, such as the failure to carry passbooks. In reading this violence from the perspectives of both the Black worker and the white farmer, Nkosi deploys the device of the eye to look at his research subjects and make sense of how the past informs the present. His argument is that the violence against Black farmworkers was not only on the exploitation of cheap labour, but also an anxiety white farmers felt about their settler-colonial appropriation of land. This anxiety, Nkosi argues, is pervasive in current heated public debates on the land question and calls for ‘land expropriation without compensation’. Furthermore, the dispossession of Black people from their land cannot be overcome until there is a recognition of the dead and restless spirits of the land, and a spiritual return to home for Black people’s ancestors. Until such time, the cycles of violence will persist. This book will be of interest to academics and scholars working in the area of land and workers’ struggles but also to the general reader who wants to gain a deeper understanding of redress and social justice on multiple levels.
Contesting one’s place remains central to confronting the lingering impact of colonisation and apartheid, emerging as it does out of the intermingling of our environments, histories, languages and experiences. In this volume, architects, anthropologists, artists, urban planners, activists and historians examine the ways in which people are rethinking, repurposing and reusing colonial and apartheid architecture and infrastructure. They seek to engage with ways in which history, art and architecture practices contest and subvert these protracted conditions in terms of social justice, development, conservation, heritage, land reclamation and urban renewal. The focus is on colonial environments in different parts of South Africa and Africa to understand the history of disputed places and responses of remembrance, communal consideration, revival and conflict. In recent years, public awareness of the physical and environmental reminders of this past has been sharpened by sporadic campaigns and ongoing disputes around land, gentrification, repatriation and heritage. Globally, there has been a wave of public outcry and contestation about the place of racist names and statues in public spaces, litigation over abandoned and toxic sites, with calls for removal and restitution as an integral part of decolonisation. And there has been recognition of the lived experiences, knowledge and activities through which people and communities build their heritage. In this context, questions about the place of colonial and apartheid planning and architecture and their past acquire salience and urgency in the present.
The uplifting true story. A Sunday Times bestseller, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. The story of the couple who lost everything and embarked on a journey, not of escape, but salvation. Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, the couple lose their home and their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset via Devon and Cornwall. They have almost no money for food or shelter and must carry only the essentials for survival on their backs as they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky. Yet through every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, their walk becomes a remarkable journey. The Salt Path is an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world. Ultimately, it is a portrayal of home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways.
The book we need NOW to avoid a social recession, Murthy’s prescient message is about the importance of human connection, the hidden impact of loneliness on our health, and the social power of community. Humans are social creatures: In this simple and obvious fact lies both the problem and the solution to the current crisis of loneliness. In his groundbreaking book, the 19th surgeon general of the United States Dr. Vivek Murthy makes a case for loneliness as a public health concern: a root cause and contributor to many of the epidemics sweeping the world today from alcohol and drug addiction to violence to depression and anxiety. Loneliness, he argues, is affecting not only our health, but also how our children experience school, how we perform in the workplace, and the sense of division and polarization in our society. But, at the center of our loneliness is our innate desire to connect. We have evolved to participate in community, to forge lasting bonds with others, to help one another, and to share life experiences. We are, simply, better together. The lessons in Together have immediate relevance and application. These four key strategies will help us not only to weather this crisis, but also to heal our social world far into the future.
During Murthy’s research for Together, he found that there were few issues that elicited as much enthusiastic interest from both very conservative and very liberal members of Congress, from young and old people, or from urban and rural residents alike. Loneliness was something so many people have known themselves or have seen in the people around them. In the book, Murthy also shares his own deeply personal experiences with the subject—from struggling with loneliness in school, to the devastating loss of his uncle who succumbed to his own loneliness, as well as the important example of community and connection that his parents modeled. Simply, it’s a universal condition that affects all of us directly or through the people we love—now more than ever.
Herman Lategan word wyd gerespekteer as joernalis, en is beide berug én beroemd vir sy uitgesprokenheid en kwinkslae oor alles onder die son. In Hoerkind vertel hy sy lewensverhaal uit die hart uit, sonder doekies omdraai. Hy is een warm Februarienag in 1964 in ’n losieshuis in Kaapstad verwek – buite die eg. Van jongs af het hy soos ’n weggooimens gevoel, want hy is deur grootmense wat die lewe op onvaste voet betree het, van die een stel hande na die ander aangegee. Op 13 beland hy in die kloue van ’n geslepe pedofiel, ’n bekende Afrikaanse koerantman in daardie jare. Pas na sy 18de verjaarsdag, wanneer sy molesteerder met hom klaar is, word Herman sonder seremonie voor die deur van sy vervreemde alkoholis-pa afgelaai. In sy tienerjare bevriend hy Afrikaanse digters soos Sheila Cussons, Ina Rousseau, Barend J. Toerien en Casper Schmidt. Ná skool doen hy sy diensplig, maar word oneervol ontslaan en kom hy in New York aan, waar hy vir Andy Warhol op straat agtervolg en met ’n “smorgasbord van eendagsvlinders” kattemaai. Terug in Suid-Afrika maak Herman opgang as joernalis wat na die wydste hoeke van die wêreld reis. As volwassene voer hy ’n stryd met drank en dwelms en is ’n ruk lank haweloos. En vir menige werkgewer word hy die nagmerrie wat hulle die ergste vrees. Hoerkind is ’n aangrypende relaas oor verlies én oorwinning wat jou sal laat lag, en jou hart ’n paar keer breek. Jy sal jou kop skud oor die wreedheid van ’n wêreld waar mense aan mekaar uitgelewer is, maar jy sal verwonderd staan oor die omvang van goedheid, juis omdat mense op mekaar aangewese is.
Community development both a collective effort and an achievement driven by individual facilitators with the aim of lifting a community out of poverty. The sixth edition of Community Development: Breaking the cycle of poverty continues to be a definitive guide for community development workers, students and practitioners alike. The book contextualises poverty and explains the process of community development. It pays attention to the development environment and explains concepts such as asset-based community development and the social enterprise sector. In addition to context and process, the book details the skills required by a community development worker to function in the field. It also explains how to empower the development worker to train others in order to build capacity in the community and work towards breaking the cycle of poverty. This edition of Community Development: Breaking the cycle of poverty is strengthened by the inclusion of extensive support material. More practical case studies, specifically relevant to the South African environment, have been added and questions on the case studies are included in the book.
’n Ongekende opkoms van Afrikaner-magnate het die Suid-Afrikaanse
ekonomie die afgelope drie dekades gekenmerk. Dit is veral merkwaardig
in die lig van die regering se omvattende program van swart ekonomiese
bemagtiging.
A hybrid narrative, blending memoir with social commentary and political analysis. Always in search of "home", the book tracks Ismail Lagardien's vast experiences of a deeply lived life, always against a backdrop of "unbelonging" - first as a reporter in the turbulent 80s, to studying economics at the LSE, then achieving a doctorate at the University of Wales, to working as a speechwriter at the World Bank in Washington. A unique and brilliant read.
From the bestselling author of The Lost City of Z, and the Number One international bestseller The Wager, comes a true-life murder story which became one of the FBI’s first major homicide investigations. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover team began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Why... I know, why would anybody name their first book, Why? Let me quickly tell you. Exposure to pornography at a very young age and sexual abuse as a child, made my life hell. Quite frankly it ruined my whole life. I lived with daily battles that created a war within my soul. This torment lasted until I was 40 years old. I could no longer live with the trauma, the pain and suffering, emanating from my childhood events, I needed help. Just like many adults and children do too. Don’t we all have a story? Some stories are more attractive than others. This is my story. It is real, authentic, and raw. So many ask the question, Why? Not all our why’s have clear answers. And often, we never get an answer.
Why adults stay stuck in early childhood trauma? Many of your why’s will be answered through reading my life story mirrored with those of the Israelites. A story that is used multiple times in history to display Slavery and Freedom. It is a story that would help people to find true freedom, a story that will point you to the Truth. It is a story of wandering through the wilderness as a slave, with addictions, pain, and suffering. Addictions that are not easily spoken about, addictions that is not easily resolved. Addictions that many survivors don't want to have in the first place. Freedom that I so desperately longed for. Freedom I found. Freedom that can be yours too. |
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