In the run up to the 1987 election Christopher Hope returned to his native South Africa after a twelve-year absence. The nature of that year's whites-only election and the bitter defeat of the liberals led him to write this satirical, evocative portrait of what it looked and felt like growing up in a country gripped by an absurd, racist insanity. Full of exquisite and despairing descriptions, Hope weaves together journalistic commentary and his own personal story as he encounters the bloody battles that have divided his homeland. This is a mordantly witty account of escape, displacement and disillusionment, and a modern classic of journalistic memoir.

Why does Namibia’s economy look the way it does today? Was the reliance on raw materials for exports and on the service sector for employment an inevitability? And for what reasons has the manufacturing sector – the vehicle for economic development for many now-high income countries throughout the 19th and 20th centuries – seen its growth held back?

With these questions in mind, this book offers an extensive analysis of industrial development and economic change in Namibia since 1900, exploring their causes, trajectory, vicissitudes, context, and politics. Its focus is particularly on the motivations behind the economic decisions of the state, arguing that power relations – both internationally and domestically – have held firm a status quo that has resisted efforts towards profound economic change.

This work is the first in-depth economic study covering both the colonial and independence eras of Namibia’s history and provides the first history of the country’s manufacturing sector

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize,2019 In White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored how it felt and looked to grow up in a country gripped by an 'absurd, racist insanity'. On a road trip thirty years later, Hope goes in search of today's South Africa; post the evils of apartheid, but also post the dashed hopes and dreams of Mandela, of a future when race and colour would not count. He finds a country still in the grip of a ruling party intent only on caring for itself, to the exclusion of all others; a country where racial divides are deeper than ever. As the old imperial idols of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger are literally pulled from their pedestals in a mass yearning to destroy the past, Hope ponders the question: what next? Framed as a travelogue, this is a darkly comic, powerful and moving portrait of South Africa - an elegy to a living nation, which is still mad and absurd.

In the 1980s, a small man is pulled up out of the Indian Ocean in Port Pallid, SA, claiming to have been kidnapped as a baby. The Sergeant, whose job it is to sort the local people by colour, and thereby determine their fate, peers at the boy, then sticks a pencil into his hair, as one did in those days, waiting to see if it stays there, or falls out before he gives his verdict: 'He's very odd, this Jimfish you've hauled in. If he's white he is not the right sort of white. But if he's black, who can say? We'll wait before we classify him. I'll give his age as 18, and call him Jimfish. Because he's a real fish out of water, this one is.' So begins the odyssey of Jimfish, a South African Everyman, who defies the usual classification of race that defines the rainbow nation. His journey through the last years of Apartheid will extend beyond the borders of South Africa to the wider world, where he will be an unlikely witness to the defining moments of the dying days of the twentieth century. Part fable, part fierce commentary on the politics of power, this work is the culmination of a lifetime's writing and thinking, on both the Apartheid regime and the history of the twentieth century, by a writer of enormous originality and range.

Theodore Blanchaille is searching for the missing millions of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and his lost city of gold. As a child he had heard tales of Kruger from a wayward priest; what follows is an astonishing journey that takes Blanchaille through a landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots and exiled presidents. From huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison block, from a township in the bloody aftermath of 'pacification' to a secret travellers' rest for fleeing pilgrims, and from the streets and cellars of Soho to paradise at last on a Swiss mountainside, Kruger's Alp is a fantastical political satire of extraordinary invention.

This is an unforgettable, highly acclaimed novel of African childhood by a prize winning author. In the jacaranda leafed garden of his Johannesburg home, six year old Martin Donally is king of a small and perfect world. It is 1948 and life is full of buoyant childish rhymes and his colourful, Irish extended family. There's exuberant Grandpa who sings and races horses; chain smoking Auntie Fee, who always sides with the ogres in fairy tales; and above all Georgie, the family's servant and Martin's confidant. But this cosy world of fixed certainties is about to end as Martin's tale turns to one of political and personal tragedy. He can't possibly foresee the resounding defeat of the liberal government that will usher in a new era of bigotry and intolerance, nor appreciate the significance of the fact Dr Voerwoerd, architect of apartheid, is a neighbour. And what is he to make of dour, racist, Gordon his mother's husband-to-be, a man who seems determined to shatter the care-free world of the Donally's for good? "Heaven Forbid" is a wise, moving tale of innocence blighted and paradise lost; an unforgettable novel of childhood, family and the impact on a private world of a crucial moment in history. 'A clever, economical novel ...a potent rendering of childhood' - "Penelope Lively". 'A vivid, tender evocation of time and place, fresh and unsugared by nostalgia' - "Observer". 'Immensely alive and involving' - "Sunday Times".

Somehow, Joe Angel, the most famous businessman in the country had found Charlie in the backwater where had been hiding all these years, and arrived unannounced to give him an envelope full of money and a simple message: come back to the Capital to learn what really happened to Constanza -- the woman he loved -- on that terrible night decades before. At first, Charlie is furious that Joe should just re-appear, and with such an outrageous demand. But by the time Charlie returns to the city to meet Joe, the tycoon is dead. And so begin Charlie Croker's epic journey back into his own past. It is an odyssey which seems, at times, to lead right to the broken heart of the country itself. After a lifetime spent trying to forget, Charlie realizes that there can, finally, be a reckoning with his those he has loved and those he has betrayed, and the guilt that has been suffocating him.

In the 1980s, a small man is pulled up out of the Indian Ocean in Port Pallid, SA, claiming to have been kidnapped as a baby. The Sergeant, whose job it is to sort the local people by colour, and thereby determine their fate, peers at the boy, then sticks a pencil into his hair, as one did in those days, waiting to see if it stays there, or falls out before he gives his verdict: 'He's very odd, this Jimfish you've hauled in. If he's white he is not the right sort of white. But if he's black, who can say? We'll wait before we classify him. I'll give his age as 18, and call him Jimfish. Because he's a real fish out of water, this one is.'

So begins the odyssey of Jimfish, a South African Everyman, who defies the usual classification of race that defines the rainbow nation. His journey through the last years of Apartheid will extend beyond the borders of South Africa to the wider world, where he will be an unlikely witness to the defining moments of the dying days of the twentieth century.

Part fable, part fierce commentary on the politics of power, this work is the culmination of a lifetime's writing and thinking, on both the Apartheid regime and the history of the twentieth century, by a writer of enormous originality and range

A brilliant examination of Robert Mugabe dictatorship and the nature of modern tyranny, written by an award winning novelist and journalist.Christopher Hope met his first dictator when he was 6 years old. Dr Henrik Verwoerd was a neighbour of the Hope family and went on to become the architect of apartheid. He was the first, but not the last. In this remarkable book, Christopher Hope searches out the unmistakable 'perfume' that marks out a tyrant, a tyrant like Robert Mugabe. Hope though the days of Verwoerd were gone until Robert Mugabe began to mimic the old Doctor. Hope dissects the person and presumption of Mugabe, the mixture of terror and comedy that makes up his dictatorship. Furthermore Perfume of a Tyrant describes the nature of modern tyranny, its wild paranoia, its murderous conviction of righteousness, its narrow depleted vocabulary and its inability to concede power, however small. Even though modern tyranny is not exclusively Zimbabwean, African or European, in Robert Mugabe is its leading exponent

Max Montfalcon lay in bed and tried to remember how many people he had killed... Old Max, the genial giant of Serenity House, north London's 'Premier Eventide Refuge', might have been left to die in peace. But his son-in-law Albert, an MP with a special interest in the War Crimes Bill, has other ideas. Then Jack arrives. An all-American boy who survives on a diet of video nasties and Chinese takeaways. Max is haunted by dreams of the Holocaust. And the occupants of Serenity House are haunted by Jack...