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 is the most urgent book ever to appear from the pen of cultural icon Koos Kombuis.

Sometimes, when he is in an irreverent mood, Koos writes under the fun-filled pseudonym ‘Joe Kitchen’.

This time around, though, he is deadly serious.

“The Death of History” is a climate change diary. When Koos started writing it more than two years ago, he did not intend for it to be published as a book, but the longer he continued writing, the more he became aware of the urgency of sharing his message with the world.

In short, “The Death of History” is a warning to all of humanity that must be heeded NOW.

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.

Why do these large financial institutions with hundreds of billions on their books fail out of the blue? What role do central banks play in these dramatic failures? How can the global financial system be reformed to be more resilient, and what path should South Africa take?

In a world where banks are perceived as unshakeable fortresses, there is a worrying truth that lies just beneath the surface: banks are far more fragile and fail more frequently than we choose to believe.

In the US alone, more than 560 banks have failed since the turn of the century. In South Africa, the collapse of Saambou in 2002 sparked the A2 Banking Crisis, which saw half the country’s banks deregistered in the aftermath. In 2023, the high-profile failures of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, Signature Bank and Credit Suisse dominated global headlines and set off waves of panic across the international banking landscape.

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.

On October 7, Israeli territory around the Erez border of Gaza Strip was invaded by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, killing over 1,000 people. In response to this, the people of Gaza have been subjected to nearly eight months of wholesale genocide. Over 36,000 civilians have been killed, an estimated million made homeless and displaced, tens of thousands injured, and an entire population traumatised. Never in living history has such an atrocity been perpetrated in plain sight of the world’s leaders and mainstream media, who have all managed to give it their complete backing. Images and video clips of hourly horrors and tragedies have spread around the world, combatted by fake news propagated not by dark conspiratorial corners on the web, but by corporate media outlets and politicians.

Baseless Israeli propaganda and deliberately-biased framing has been fed to journalists and repeated, without question, on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and in the mouths of TV pundits and politicians.

One of the few voices of Gaza to make it out into Western media has been that of writer Atef Abu Saif, whose edited diary entries have been occasionally serialised in The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and elsewhere. Here, the complete, unedited diaries show the journey of a man who arrived in Gaza just a few days before October 7 as a government minister and ended the period, like most other Palestinians, living in a tent in a refugee camp.

A Manifesto For Social Change is the third of a three-volume series that started seven years ago investigating the causes of our country’s – and the continent’s – development obstacles.

Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing (2009) set out to explain what role African elites played in creating and promoting their fellow Africans’ misery. Advocates for Change: How to Overcome Africa’s Challenges (2011) set out to show that there were short-term to medium-term solutions to many of Africa’s and South Africa’s problems, from agriculture to healthcare, if only the powers that be would take note. And now, more than 20 years after the advent of democracy, we have A Manifesto For Social Change: How To Save South Africa, the conclusion in the ‘trilogy’.

This book started its life as Gridlocked, but through the process of research undertaken by Moeletsi and Nobantu it has evolved into a different project, a manifesto that identifies some of South Africa’s key problems and what is required to change the country’s downward trajectory.

Can racism and intimacy co-exist? Can love and friendship form and flourish across South Africa’s imposed colour lines?

Who better to engage on the subject of hazardous liaisons than the students with whom Jonathan Jansen served over seven years as Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State. The context is the University campus in Bloemfontein, the City of Roses, the Mississippi of South Africa. Rural, agricultural, insular, religious and conservative, this is not a place for breaking out. But over the years, Jansen observed shifts in campus life and noticed more and more openly interracial friendships and couples, and he began having conversations with these students with burning questions in mind.

Ten interracial couples tell their stories of love and friendship in their own words, with no social theories imposed on their meanings, but instead a focus on how these students experience the world of interracial relationships, and how flawed, outdated laws and customs set limits on human relationships, and the long shadow they cast on learning, living and loving on university campuses to this day.

Theories For Decolonial Social Work Practice In South Africa is a local book critically presenting social work theories that are suitable for decolonial and developmental generalist practice in the Global South. The choice of theories included in this book is informed by the lived experiences of South Africans in a multicultural, post-colonial, post-apartheid society.

The book sees the goal of social work as effecting transformation and liberation, through the implementation of the developmental approach, and by drawing on decolonial and African concepts. It supports social workers in working toward this goal by stimulating critical reflection and disrupting taken-for-granted beliefs and practices. It guides readers to work with client groups across the micro-mezzo-macro continuum in such a way that they are empowered to develop agency, thereby affirming the basic values of social justice and human dignity.

Theories For Decolonial Social Work Practice In South Africa is suitable for social work education and the in-service training of qualified social workers, child and youth care workers and community development practitioners. In addition, the book will be of interest to social work academics and researchers because of its unique decolonial and African approach to Global North theories, and its contribution to the development of Global South theories.

Born in Qqeberha in the 1990s, popular Aids activist Nozibele Mayaba’s upbringing was one of struggle and strife. She was raised by the tough hand of her mother in the confines of a strict Christian household. Nozibele strove to be the “good girl” that everyone adores to win her mother’s approval and the affection of her absent father.

She lived by the book and was steered by her faith. Hers becomes a life of firsts. She is the first person in her family to travel overseas. The first to graduate from university. It is also her first love, with his infectious smile that infected her with HIV.

This diagnosis throws her life into disarray. Fearing stigma and feeling the need to maintain her “good girl” image, she kept her status a secret. However, she soon succumbed to depression. It is in the aftermath, when she picks up the broken pieces of her life that she finds purpose in all the pain she has endured.

She went public with her story in a video that when viral and launched her onto a new path. Nozibele, who has since gotten married and recently became a mother, has made it her mission to hold open conversations about her journey living with HIV.

Told with gut wrenching honesty, Nozibele is at her most vulnerable in this brave account about what it means to live and love beyond HIV.

In the spirit of Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, a powerful collection of essays about gender, sexuality, race, beauty, Hollywood, and what it means to be a modern woman.

One month before the release of the highly anticipated film The Birth of a Nation, actress Gabrielle Union shook the world with a vulnerable and impassioned editorial in which she urged our society to have compassion for victims of sexual violence. In the wake of rape allegations made against director and actor Nate Parker, Union—a forty-four-year-old actress who launched her career with roles in iconic ’90s movies—instantly became the insightful, outspoken actress that Hollywood has been desperately awaiting. With honesty and heartbreaking wisdom, she revealed her own trauma as a victim of sexual assault: "It is for you that I am speaking. This is real. We are real."

In this moving collection of thought provoking essays infused with her unique wisdom and deep humor, Union uses that same fearlessness to tell astonishingly personal and true stories about power, color, gender, feminism, and fame. Union tackles a range of experiences, including bullying, beauty standards, and competition between women in Hollywood, growing up in white California suburbia and then spending summers with her black relatives in Nebraska, coping with crushes, puberty, and the divorce of her parents. Genuine and perceptive, Union bravely lays herself bare, uncovering a complex and courageous life of self-doubt and self-discovery with incredible poise and brutal honesty. Throughout, she compels us to be ethical and empathetic, and reminds us of the importance of confidence, self-awareness, and the power of sharing truth, laughter, and support.

The renowned social scientist, professor, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational delivers his most urgent and compelling book: an eye-opening exploration of the human side of the misinformation crisis, examining what drives otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs.

Misinformation affects us daily, from social media to politics and even personal relationships. Policing social media alone cannot solve the complex problem shaped by partisan politics and subjective interpretations of truth.

In Misbelief social scientist Dan Ariely explores the behaviour of 'misbelief' that leads people to distrust accepted truths and embrace conspiracy theories. Misinformation taps into something innate in all of us, regardless of political affiliation. By understanding this psychology, we can mitigate its effects. Grounded in research and Ariely's personal experience as a target of disinformation, the book analyses the psychological drivers behind adopting irrational beliefs. Ariely reveals the emotional, cognitive, personality, and social elements that drive people towards false information and mistrust.

Despite advanced AI generating convincing fake news, Ariely offers hope. Awareness of the forces fuelling misbelief makes individuals and society more resilient. Combating misbelief requires empathy, not conflict. Recognising misbelief as a human problem allows us to be part of the solution.

South Africa’s social landscape is disfigured by poverty, inequality and mass unemployment. Poverty in South Africa: Past and Present argues that it is impossible to think coherently or constructively about poverty, and the challenge it poses, without a clear understanding of its origins, its long-term development, and it’s changing character over time. This historical overview seeks to show how poverty in the past has shaped poverty in the present. Colin Bundy traces the lasting scars left on the face of South African poverty by colonial dispossession, coerced labour and segregation; and by a capitalist system distinctive for its reliance on cheap, right-less black labour. While the exclusion of the poor occurs in very many countries, in South Africa it has a distinctive extra dimension. Here, poverty has been profoundly racialised by law, by social practice, and by prejudice. He shows that the ‘solution’ to the ‘poor white question’ in the 1920s and ’30s had profound and lasting implications for black poverty. After an analysis of urban and rural poverty prior to 1948, he describes the impact of apartheid policies and social engineering on poverty. Over four decades, apartheid reshaped the geography and demography of poverty. This pocket history concludes with two chapters that assess the policies and thinking of the ANC government in its responses to poverty. One describes the remarkable story of the social security programme developed by the ANC in government since 1994, and finds that cash transfers – pensions and grants – have been the most effective mechanism of redistribution used by the ANC, even though the party remains edgy and anxious about a ‘culture of entitlement’. A final chapter reviews the distribution and dimensions of contemporary poverty, inequality and unemployment, and considers available policy options – and their shortcomings.

Social science researchers in the global South, and in South Africa particularly, utilise research methods in innovative ways in order to respond to contexts characterised by diversity, racial and political tensions, socioeconomic disparities and gender inequalities. These methods often remain undocumented – a gap that this book starts to address.

Written by experts from various methodological fields, Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences is a comprehensive collation of original essays and cutting-edge research that demonstrates the variety of novel techniques and research methods available to researchers responding to these context-bound issues. It is particularly relevant for study and research in the fields of applied psychology, sociology, ethnography, biography and anthropology. In addition to their unique combination of conceptual and application issues, the chapters also include discussions on ethical considerations relevant to the method in similar global South contexts.

Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences has much to offer to researchers, professionals and others involved in social science research both locally and internationally.

"So here I am, at a psychiatric hospital, looking for myself in a building I’ve never been in before. A few nights ago, I was ready to rid myself of myself. I still am, only, in a different way. This time, I want to do away with what I hope will soon be my former self. I don’t know what is wrong with me, I never have. All I know is that my head is clouded with loud voices screaming in different frequencies; none of them making sense. With only a stony face to hide it all behind, and a pained smile to offer my friends and colleagues."

Patient 12A is Lesedi Molefi’s absorbing memoir, reflecting on his time spent in a psychiatric clinic in 2016. With vulnerability and candour, Lesedi reflects on the moments, large and small, that led him here. It is at once a personal history, an observation of how childhood experiences can have a profound effect on the adults we become, and a commentary on how mental illness remains a difficult conversation in black families.

But more than anything, Patient 12A is Lesedi’s attempt to filter out the noise in his head to find the truth, however uncomfortable that may be.

Sociopath: A Memoir is at once a jaw-dropping tale of a life lived on the edge of the law, and a moving account of one woman's battle to gain a deeper understanding of people who, like her, are sociopaths.

Ever since she was a small child, Patric Gagne knew she was different. Although she felt intense love for her family and her best friend, David, these connections were never enough to make her be 'good', or to reduce her feelings of apathy and frustration. As she grew older, her behaviour escalated from petty theft through to breaking and entering, stalking, and worse . . .

As an adult, Patric realized that she was a sociopath. Although she instantly connected with the official descriptions of sociopathy, she also knew they didn't tell the full story: she had a plan for her life, had nurtured close relationships and was doing her best (most of the time) to avoid harming others.

While her darker impulses warred against her attempts to live a settled, loving life with her partner, Patric began to wonder - was there a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society? And could she find it before her own behaviour went a step too far?

With three bestselling books published, Khaya Dlanga is one of South Africa’s favourite authors. His ability to write candidly and authentically about himself and his world has resonated with readers from all walks of life.

In March 2020 Khaya found himself bereaved, alone and facing an indefinite lockdown as a result of COVID-19. Like most of us, he turned to social media to maintain some human connection and his followers came through and kept him going. It’s The Answers For Me is the result of Khaya’s ongoing Q&A interactions with his followers on Instagram. It’s evidence of the genuine communities that are formed on social media: intensely human, at times strange and shocking, sometimes touching and often really funny. And it’s a record of a nation going through the most bizarre (and longest) year in recent history.

Khaya’s enviable gift for storytelling makes people want to hear his stories and also to trust him with theirs. From the secrets our parents think they keep from us to the real reasons we stay in relationships, and venturing into many other everyday issues and situations, It’s the answers for me captures our collective mgowo.

It's time to fight back.

Each day, more South Africans are targeted, labelled, and hounded out of society for expressing their opinions - ordinary opinions that just a few years ago were accepted as rational common sense. Have you been "cancelled" by an online mob that won't stop harassing you until you're fired from your job? Helen Zille almost was - but she survived by fighting back. In #StayWoke: Go Broke, the bestselling author and defining South African political figure explains why the woke Left constitutes a greater threat to South Africa's future than the populist Right does.

Now more than ever, liberals must strengthen their spines and fight for their values - or be eviscerated in the Culture Wars raging across the English-speaking world. If you're looking for an incisive, indispensable survival guide through this tumultuous period of South African history, then #StayWoke: Go Broke is for you.

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.

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'.

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.

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.