Following a hiatus in the 1960s, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in South Africa was revived in 1971. In fascinating detail, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed bring the inner workings of the NIC to life against the canvas of major political developments in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, and up to the first democratic elections in 1994.

The NIC was relaunched during the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, which attracted a following among Indian university students, and whose invocation of Indians as Black led to a major debate about ethnic organisations such as the NIC. This debate persisted in the 1980s with the rise of the United Democratic Front and its commitment to non-racialism. The NIC was central to other major debates of the period, most significantly the lines drawn between boycotting and participating in government-created structures such as the Tri-Cameral Parliament. Despite threats of banning and incarceration, the NIC kept attracting recruits who encouraged the development of community organisations, such as students radicalised by the 1980s education boycotts and civic protests. Colour, Class and Community, The Natal Indian Congress, 1971—1994 details how some members of the NIC played dual roles, as members of a legal organisation and as allies of the African National Congress’ underground armed struggle.

Drawing on varied sources, including oral interviews, newspaper reports, and minutes of organisational meetings, this in-depth study tells a largely untold history, challenging existing narratives around Indian ‘cabalism’, and bringing the African and Indian political story into present debates about race, class and nation.

Although Marx's writings on social transformation figured prominently in the global Left imagination for more than 150 years, by the late 20th century the relevance of Marxism was under question by both the Left (including Marxists) and the Right. Its revival in the second decade of the 21st century is finding new sources of inspiration and creativity from movements that believe that "another world is possible" through democratic, egalitarian, and ecological alternatives to capitalism built by ordinary people. The Marxism of many of these movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive, but open, searching, utopian. It revolves around four primary factors: the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project, the ecological limits of capitalism, the crisis of global capitalism, and the learning of lessons from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. This edited book introduces some contemporary approaches to Marxism. It shows how the 21st century has seen enormous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the past by forging fundamentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration from Marxism along with many other anticapitalist traditions such as feminism, ecology, anarchism, and indigenous traditions. Featuring leading thinkers from the Left, the book offers provocative ideas on interpreting our current world and will serve as an excellent reference book to introduce a new way of thinking about Marxism to students and scholars in the field.

In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history. The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals.

"Somehow, Shakespeare always seems to have something to say to us." --Nelson Mandela
The prison authorities on the apartheid South African Robben Island were obsessed with censoring the news prisoners could receive of the outside world. Through the memories and biographical accounts written by former political inmates like Nelson Mandela, the book evocatively brings to life the power of the the written word, as well as the voices of these brilliant and courageous prisoners.

This book is an account of cricket in post-apartheid South Africa; from the tumultuous Gatting tour in which, ironically, the seeds of cricket unity were sown, to the Hansie Cronje saga and the change of leadership from Ali Bacher to Gerald Majola, and more recently to Haroon Lorgat. It is a story of a new pitch; a quick start full of hope, followed by a steady erosion of the commitments needed to fulfil the promise of a level playing field. Economic and political compromises contributed to holding back the piercing of the covers of race and class privilege. Alongside this, the hurried hollowing out of the “politics of cricket”, aided by black administrators assuming the accoutrements of office, saw very little internal challenge to the lack of transformation. Meanwhile, global realignments in cricket initially gave South Africa some respite. But soon, the big three of Australia, England and India were collaborating to claim the lion’s share of global funding, thus limiting even further the resources necessary for development in the domestic game. In a sense, we are back to the Springfield-Kingsmead divide. But there will be no posthumous honours, however grudgingly given, to lovers of the game who are keeping it alive in townships or side streets. Those whose innings are defined by lumpy mats and broken gear garner far less sympathy or note. For is cricket not now open to all, just like the Ritz Hotel; a game of money, dazzle, dancing girls and quick results?

"One is transported from barricade to courtroom to communal cooking-pot to dance-floor. You get to see the struggle from the inside out ... All I know who have read it, feel in fighting form after putting it down."
--Natal Mercury

"An exceptionally vivid and precise account of daily experiences in the new class apartheid ... Desai's book tells the story of how desperation and powerlessness have turned into organized opposition and an articulate, sophisticated language of resistance."
--Mail & Guardian

When Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, freedom-loving people around the world hailed a victory over racial domination, injustice and inequality. The end of apartheid did not change the basic conditions of life for the majority of oppressed South Africans, however. Material inequality has deepened and new forms of resistance have emerged in commnities that have discovered a common oppression and solidarty and forged new and dynamic political identities.

Desai's book follows the growth of the most unexpected of these community movements, describing from the inside the process through which the downtrodden regain their dignity and defend the most basic conditions of life. His book begins with one specific community, with local government enforcing cut-offs of water and electricity, and evicting families from their houses whose breadwinners have lost their jobs. As the Chatsworth community begins to organize and discover leaders among its ranks, so their example spreads to other communities in Durban and the KwaZulu-Natal region, and their struggles build links with those in other parts of the new South Africa.

We Are the Poors was a majorevent in the life of the South African Left when the first edition was published there in 2000. This new edition follows the ongoing course of events to the present.

In the early 1960s, the city of Durban consolidated racially circumscribed group areas with brutal intensity. In the tiny enclave of Wentworth, designated a Coloured area, newly relocated residents made their homes and sought work in the numerous heavy industries that proliferated on its edges. As people built places of worship and newborn friendships reached across fences and staircases, soccer became the game of choice. Rudimentary pitches were marked out, cool drinks staked and the game unfolded with a mixture of delicate touches and bruising tackles. By the early 1970s, Wentworth's ability to spawn soccer talent, headlined by the glamorous Leeds United, grew into the stuff of legend. Ashwin Desai digs deep into this history, bringing to life those who inspired and played the game when Wentworth was nothing more than a jumble of shacks and whitewashed blocks of flats, watched over by plumes of smoke from local factories that blackened the sky and slowly poisoned the body. The book's power comes from its ability to keep its focus on soccer while situating the game in the broader social relations, as geography and history, spatial and temporal meld into a beguiling narrative. Page after page reveals writing of haunting power and sensitivity as memories are cajoled from ageing soccer legends and the interior lives of families are illuminated. It is an evocative exemplar of how community history should be brought to life.

In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history. The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals.

This title is about the clandestine role of William Shakespeare literature on Robben Island among the political prisoners during the Apartheid era. It's essentially about how the literature was used in a disguised manner as religious material, to form part of the political education among the prisoners. The prison authorities on Robben Island displayed a remarkable obsession with censoring the news that prisoners could receive of the outside world. Yet, as the pages of this book reveal, political prisoners managed to escape these constraints through literature, travelling to the sites of contemporary revolutionary struggles and to the frontlines of the French and Bolshevik revolutions. Tolstoy jostled with Trotsky, while Shakespeare 'winged' his way over the walls of the single and communal cells. As the prisoners brought their experiences to bear on the text, the works of Shakespeare were mined for their anti-colonial and anti-apartheid inspirations as much as for the power and beauty of their words. The texts also left their mark on the consciousness and memories of liberation fighters, with many prisoners reciting lines from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets some three decades after their release. Through the memories and biographical accounts written by former political inmates, the book evocatively brings to life the voices of prisoners who furtively copied books at night before they were snatched back by the warders. This book is about those books, about how words can inspire the human spirit, light up the intellect and free the reader to travel the world. But this is not a book simply about the past.

The subject of race and identity is a burning issue which continues to occupy the attention not only of South Africans but also the wider residents of the continent of Africa and those who are Africans in the Diaspora. The outburst of xenophobic attacks against foreigners mostly of Black African origins in some communities of Kwa-Zulu Natal and areas of Johannesburg during 2008 and 2015 has raised questions about the social cohesion of South African society linked to unresolved structural identity issues bequeathed by the nation's past colonial and apartheid legacy. This publication argues that there is an embedded schizophrenic identity crisis within the society that requires scholarly interrogation. The chapters assemble scholarly voices from different ethnic groups that examine the central research question of this study: Who is an African? Within the wider Southern African context, identity and ethnicity politics are framing nationalist economic policies and are impacting on social cohesion within many countries. Writing from different social and racial locations the authors have critically engaged with the central question and offer some important insights that can serve as a resource for all nations grappling with issues of race, ethnicity, identity constructed politics, and social cohesion.

The South African past is rich with stories of courage, initiative and endeavour which have never become history because they are the stories of those excluded from power. This title seeks to transform some of these stories into history: in this case into the history of cricket in Natal, hitherto dominated by the official and privileged. In so doing the title also makes an important intervention in the ever-present crisis of South African cricket, not only as the spirit of the game is undermined by the ethos of global marketing, but as cricket continues to stumble under the burden of its racist past. This burden will only be lifted by those able to see this past for what it.

The subject of race and identity is a burning issue which continues to occupy the attention not only of South Africans but also the wider residents of the continent of Africa and those who are Africans in the Diaspora. The outburst of xenophobic attacks against foreigners mostly of Black African origins in some communities of Kwa-Zulu Natal and areas of Johannesburg during 2008 and 2015 has raised questions about the social cohesion of South African society linked to unresolved structural identity issues bequeathed by the nation's past colonial and apartheid legacy. This publication argues that there is an embedded schizophrenic identity crisis within the society that requires scholarly interrogation. The chapters assemble scholarly voices from different ethnic groups that examine the central research question of this study: Who is an African? Within the wider Southern African context, identity and ethnicity politics are framing nationalist economic policies and are impacting on social cohesion within many countries. Writing from different social and racial locations the authors have critically engaged with the central question and offer some important insights that can serve as a resource for all nations grappling with issues of race, ethnicity, identity constructed politics, and social cohesion.