First published to international acclaim in 1996, The Seed Is Mine is a bold and innovative social history concerning the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa.

After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbours, employers, friends, and family – a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication – Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.

R.W. Johnson's articles and essays travel far beyond Southern Africa, reaching readers across continents. Their appeal lies not only in their acuity but also in his exceptional range of subjects – political, historical and cultural. As a former Oxford don and a leading international commentator, Johnson remains unmatched as an interpreter of national and world events.

Whether he's writing about politics in South Africa, Europe or the United States, the new space race, the leading personalities of our time, or even soccer, his views are always sharp, clear, deeply informed and original.

These essays belong unmistakably to the tradition of George Orwell. Orwell aspired to make political writing an art form, but his finest essays – even those on seemingly trivial subjects such as boys' comics – revealed both a penetrating intelligence and remarkable breadth. Johnson's writing is similar in spirit: like Orwell's, his essays can be read consecutively or dipped into at random, each one offering something striking and original.

The result is A Roving Eye, a book that is not just distinctive but truly unique, marked by depth, range, humanity and a rare sophistication.

R.W. Johnson, author of 17 books and innumerable articles, attended schools in the UK and South Africa, did his first degree at the University of Natal and was then a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. For 26 years he was a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford and he remains a Fellow of the College. An expert in French, British, American and South African politics, his books have ranged over all these interests and for many years he also wrote for The (London) Times, Sunday Times, the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique and other titles in the international media. Johnson's writings have been widely praised and have often excited controversy. He is a master of the essay form and his essays have had a wide circulation. He is married to the Russian scholar, Irina Filatova, and they live in Cape Town.

Mzuzephi Mathebula, also known as Jan Note and later as Nongoloza, founded the Umkhosi Wezi-ntaba (Regiment of the Hills), forerunner of the notorious "28" gang. He became known as the King of Nineveh, a man who sought social justice, paradoxically, through antisocial means. Nongoloza's story is also the story of South Africa's violent and racially accentuated past and, to an extent, provides clarification for the criminality that afflicts the present-day society.

Nongoloza Mathebula’s life is a poignant illustration of how political circumstances affect lives and how those lives encourage myths, setting in motion a spiral of events that eventually neither politics nor people have any control over. Van Onselen’s insightful biography tells the story of how a young man became a hardened criminal as the result of a minor incident.

Nongoloza Mathebula’s life is a poignant illustration of how political circumstances affect lives and how those lives encourage myths, setting in motion a spiral of events that eventually neither politics nor people have any control over.

Johannesburg was - and is - the Frontier of Money. Within months of its founding, the mining camp was host to organised crime: the African ‘Regiment of the Hills’ and ‘Irish Brigade’ bandits. Bars, brothels, boarding houses and hotels oozed testosterone and violence, and the use of fists and guns was commonplace.

Beyond the chaos were clear signs of another struggle, one to maintain control, honour and order within the emerging male and mining dominated culture. In the underworld, the dictum of ‘honour among thieves’, as well as a hatred of informers, testified to attempts at self-regulation. A ‘real man’ did not take advantage of an opponent by employing underhand tactics. It had to be a ‘fair fight’ if a man was to be respected.

This was the world that ‘One-armed Jack’ McLoughlin - brigand, soldier, sailor, mercenary, burglar, highwayman and safe-cracker – entered in the early 1890s to become Johannesburg’s most infamous ‘Irish’ anti-hero and social bandit. McLoughlin’s infatuation with George Stevenson prompted him to recruit the young Englishman into his gang of safe-crackers but ‘Stevo’ was a man with a past and primed for personal and professional betrayal. It was a deadly mixture.

Honour could only be retrieved through a Showdown at the Red Lion.

For two decades before a railway system linked southern Africa’s principal cities in the mid-1890’s, the world’s richest supplies of diamonds and gold were transported by coach and horses to distant ports for export. For Irish soldiers based at Fort Napier, Pietermaritzburg, the temptation of this fabulous wealth proved irresistible: they deserted by the score and, as members of the ciminal ‘Irish Brigade’, embarked on a spree of bank, safe and highway robberies.

Masked Raiders follows the wild exploits of legendary brigands like the McKeone brothers and ‘One Armed Jack’ McLoughlin, who ravaged the subcontinent, from the mining towns of Barberton, Kimberley and Johannesburg, to the borders of Basotholand, Bechuanaland, Mozambique and Rhodesia. With tales of heists, safe-cracking, illegal gold dealings, prison breaks and hidden roadside treasure, the book reveals the potency of the highveld’s ‘criminal heroes’.

Startling insights also reveal how the hidden grammar of brigandage informed political actions of the day, such as the Jameson Raid, and how the movement of bandits across the interior helped shape the borders of what was to become modern South Africa.

The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For over a century the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil John Rhodes. Yet the wild adventurism that characterised the raid resembles a cowboy expedition more than a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government.

In The Cowboy Capitalist, Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld.

This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africa’s critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family - a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication - Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.

“If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.” — Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe

“An epic … [that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world.” — Vincent Crapanzano, the New York Times

“A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims … This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties.” — Eugene Genovese, Emory University

“[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation . . . It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive … ” — Linda Ensor, Business Day

ON THE NIGHT TRAINS, THE LAST STOP WAS ALWAYS HELL.

The price exacted from across the African subcontinent for South Africa's stalled 20th-century industrial revolution is, in human terms, still largely hidden from history. For half a century, up to the mid-1950s, privately operated trains travelled by night between Ressano Garcia, on the Mozambique border, and Booysens station, in Johannesburg. The night trains carried Mozambicans recruited to work in the mines of the booming Witwatersrand. The up-trains disgorged their human cargo into the maw of the great Rand mining machine, while the down-trains whisked away the time-expired miners - often ill, broken or insane, and preyed on by con men, petty criminals and corrupt officials. While mine labour was recruited from all over southern Africa, Mozambican migrants made up the largest component, and they paid the highest price.

Charles van Onselen clinically reconstructs the world of the night trains, which were run as a partnership between the mining houses and the railways. By tracing the up and down rail journeys undertaken by black migrants over half a century it is possible to discern how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected South Africa's evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. Mirroring the brutal logic of industrial capitalism, this was a system of transport designed to maximise profit at the expense of the health, well-being and even the lives of those it conveyed.

The story of the night trains echoes today through songs such as 'Stimela' and 'Shosholoza'. But the experience of the poverty-stricken Mozambicans who travelled on the trains has never been told. THE NIGHT TRAINS lays bare this hellish world.

This seminal book reveals how black labour was exploited in twentieth-century South Africa, the human costs of which are still largely hidden from history. It was the people of southern Mozambique, bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labour and slavery, then sold off en masse as contracted labourers, who paid the highest price for South African gold. An iniquitous intercolonial agreement for the exploitation of ultra-cheap black labour was only made possible through nightly use of the steam locomotive on the transnational railway linking Johannesburg and Lourenco Marques. These night trains left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities, whether in the form of popular songs or a belief in nocturnal witches' trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region's most unpopular places of employment. By tracing the journeys undertaken by black migrants, Charles van Onselen powerfully reconstructs how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected the evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. On the night trains, the last stop was always hell.

At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps and 'white slavers' established a hugely successful global market for commercial sex. Criminal syndicates from Buenos Aires to London and from Cape Town to New York were able to organise the seduction or rape of women in under-developed parts of Europe and their 'export' as prostitutes to meet an insatiable demand for sexual services. For three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph Silver - brothel-owner, pimp and trafficker in women on four continents - was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust and sexual slavery. Burglar, gun-runner, jewel-thief, rapist, safe-cracker and sodomist, Silver's notoriety was captured in the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries in the western world. What those in charge of law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves, however, was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates built on 'vice', only to have him outwit them as he moved in the dangerous space between police and prostitutes. A disturbed adolescent, youthful predator and adult misogynist driven by dark biblical and medieval obsessions, Silver's mental universe remained largely hidden from his family, other gangsters and police handlers. In this first reconstruction of the life of a dangerous psychopath, Charles van Onselen situates the private life of one man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world to identify the most infamous serial killer of all time - for Joseph Silver's darkest secret of all lay in London, in Whitechapel, in the autumn of 1888.