When John Kgoana Nkadimeng travelled from Sekhukhuneland to the Witwatersrand in 1944, he was one of thousands of migrants seeking work in town. But his encounters with racial injustice and contact with activists drew him down a very different path, one which was dedicated to the struggle.

Mokgomana tells the story of Nkadimeng, from his origins in the rural village of Manganeng, in an area with a long history of resistance to colonial rule, through his growing involvement in trade unions, the Communist Party and the ANC. He spearheaded rural opposition to Bantu Authorities, helped take new MK recruits out of the country, and played a crucial role in re-establishing the ANC underground after the state smashed resistance networks. In 1976 he fled South Africa for the perilous terrain of building MK organisations in Swaziland and Mozambique. In 1982 he settled in Lusaka and played a pivotal part in the leadership of the ANC, Communist Party and SACTU during that decisive decade.

Mokgomana represents a new focus on an under-acknowledged leader and offers fresh perspectives on over four decades of struggle history. It is also the story of the family which supported him, enduring harassment and separation, and their own splintered trajectories through exile and homecoming.

The issue of land rights is an ongoing and complex topic of debate for South Africans. Rights to Land comes at a time when land redistribution by government is underway. This book seeks to understand the issues around land rights and distribution of land in South Africa and proposes that new policies and processes should be developed and adopted. It further provides an analysis of what went so wrong, and warns that a new phase of restitution may ignite conflicting ethnic claims and facilitate elite capture of land and rural resources.

While there are no quick fixes, the first phase of restitution should be completed and the policy then curtailed. The book argues that land ownership and administration is important to rural democracy and that this should not be placed under the control of traditionalist intermediaries. Land restitution, initiated in 1994, was an important response to the injustices of the apartheid era. But it was intended as a limited and short-term process – initially to be completed in five years.

It may continue for decades, creating uncertainty and undermining investment into agriculture.

If you drive through Mpumalanga with an eye on the landscape flashing by, you may see, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above and in the valleys below, fragments of building in stone as well as sections of stone-walling breaking the grass cover. Endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages, cover the landscape stretching from Ohrigstad to Carolina, connecting over 10 000 square kilometres of the escarpment into a complex web of stone-walled homesteads, terraced fields and linking roads. Oral traditions recorded in the early twentieth century named the area Bokoni - the country of the Koni people. Few South Africans or visitors to the country know much about these settlements, and why today they are deserted and largely ignored. A long tradition of archaeological work which might provide some of the answers remains cloistered in universities and the knowledge vacuum has been filled by a variety of exotic explanations - invoking ancient settlers from India or even visitors from outer space - that share a common assumption that Africans were too primitive to have created such elaborate stone structures. Forgotten World defies the usual stereotypes about backward African farming methods and shows that these settlements were at their peak between 1500 and 1820, that they housed a substantial population, organised vast amounts of labour for infrastructural development, and displayed extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity. The Koni were part of a trading system linked to the coast of Mozambique and the wider world of Indian Ocean trade beyond. Forgotten World tells the story of Bokoni through rigorous historical and archaeological research, and lavishly illustrates it with stunning photographic images.

In no other society in the world have urbanisation and industrialization been as comprehensively based on migrant labour as in South Africa. Rather than focusing on the well-documented narrative of displacement and oppression, A Long Way Home captures the humanity, agency and creative modes of self-expression of the millions of workers who helped to build and shape modern South Africa. The book spans a three-hundred-year history beginning with the exportation of slave labour from Mozambique in the eighteenth century and ending with the strikes and tensions on the platinum belt in recent years. It shows not only the age-old mobility of African migrants across the continent but also, with the growing demand for labour in the mining industry, the importation of Chinese indentured migrant workers. Contributions include 18 essays and over 90 artworks and photographs that traverse homesteads, chiefdoms and mining hostels, taking readers into the materiality of migrant life and its customs and traditions, including the rituals practiced by migrants in an effort to preserve connections to "home" and create a sense of "belonging". The essays and visual materials provide multiple perspectives on the lived experience of migrant labourers and celebrate their extraordinary journeys. A Long Way Home was conceived during the planning of an art exhibition entitled 'Ngezinyawo: Migrant Journeys' at Wits Art Museum. The interdisciplinary nature of the contributions and the extraordinary collection of images selected to complement and expand on the text make this a unique collection.

This title is a catalogue and a reader. It is the companion to the exhibition 'Democracy X: Marking the Present; Re-presenting the past' held in the Iziko Castle Galleries in Cape Town in 2004, as part of the official activities to mark ten years of democracy in South Africa. The exhibition was designed to create awareness of, and appreciation for, the diversity of cultures in South Africa by drawing attention to the importance of all the cultures of South Africa. Two interrelated purposes shape this text. The first is to present a written and visual record of the exhibition. It functions as a catalogue in which the exhibition is recorded as accurately and as comprehensively as possible. The second is to explore a range of historical, cultural and political matters, related to the exhibition but not strictly confined to it. Its other role, then, is that of a reader providing a resource to stimulate and support historical, cultural and political debate. There are reasons for combining these two roles in one publication. 'Democracy X' is not a conventional art or cultural exhibition. It was conceived to narrate the cultural history of South Africa in broad sweeps, which departs from traditional representations of the past that rely on documentary evidence or from art exhibitions, in which works are presented in isolation from their historical contexts. It draws on iconic and everyday cultural objects from different historical eras in South Africa. The objects serve both as cultural things in themselves and as symbolic representations of the cultures and times to which they belong. They are therefore entry points to cultures and histories that suggest and even tell stories, conjure past societies and highlight complex relations between cultures. The exhibition was designed to create awareness and appreciation for the diversity of cultures in South Africa by drawing attention to the importance of all the cultures of South Africa. It is therefore an attempt to facilitate cultural knowledge, pride in and respect for all South African cultures and for their roles in the past and now. This publication, which takes the exhibition as a starting point for wide-ranging reflections, seeks to disseminate the aims and intentions of the exhibition much wider than the walls of any exhibition space permits.The exhibition was conceived to trace the course of South Africa's long and intricate path to democracy, from the earliest traces of humanity to the present. A central premise is that contemporary democracy has been nourished by some elements from the range of cultures and histories that have collided and cross-fertilised in the course of this journey. Coinciding with the celebration of a decade of democracy, it is not restricted to this moment. It depicts a dynamic past which speaks to the present as it dynamically unfolds into the future on what here and everywhere are the ever-fragile foundations of democracy.