Africa is falling. Africa is succeeding. Africa is betraying its citizens. Africa is a place of starvation, corruption, disease. African economies are soaring faster than any on earth. Africa is squandering its bountiful resources. Africa is a roadmap for global development. Africa is turbulent. Africa is stabilising. Africa is doomed. Africa is the future.

All of these pronouncements prove equally true and false, as South African journalists Richard Poplak and Kevin Bloom discover on their 9-year roadtrip through the paradoxical continent they call home. From pillaged mines in Zimbabwe to the creation of an economic marketplace in Ethiopia; from Namibia’s middle class to the technological challenges facing Nollywood in the 21st Century; from China’s investment in Botswana to the rush for resources in the Congo; and from the birth of Africa’s newest country, South Sudan, to the worsening conflict in CAR, here are eight adventures on the trail of a new Africa.

Part detective story, part report from this economic frontier, Continental Shift follows the money as it flows through Chinese coffers to international conglomerates, to heads of state, to ordinary African citizens, all of whom are intent on defining a metamorphosing continent.

Running like a red thread through this book are the manifestations of Sino-African relations dating back many centuries. In this way, The Rise and Decline and Rise of China: Searching for an Organising Philosophy takes forward the work MISTRA conducted on the Mapungubwe society, one of the advanced states that existed in southern Africa some 800 years ago, and which enjoyed trade relations with China and other centres in the East. Mapungubwe rose and fell, long before European colonial incursions. Other states emerged in the vicinity, but they also suffered the same fate. When do southern Africa and Africa at large rise again? Are there lessons that the continent can draw from the experience of the Chinese people? If - beyond material considerations - religion, culture and ideology do play a role in the rise, decline and resurgence of a civilization, what are the similarities and contrasts between these regions? Of course, such research cannot ignore the fundamental questions: whence does the current system of social, economic and political relations in China draw its resilience, how adaptable is it, and is it sustainable? As the outcome contained in this book demonstrates, a research exercise of this kind can only be exploratory. It serves merely as a genesis to work that should find new legs. What makes this research report unique, though, is that the treatment of these issues has been undertaken primarily from an African perspective.

What happens to our pop culture when it meets another culture head-onespecially one that, according to some, is completely at odds with our own? In The Sheikh s Batmobile, pop culture commentator Richard Poplak sets out on an unusual two-year odyssey. His mission is to see what becomes of his and America s obsessionspop songs and sitcoms, Hollywood movies and shoot-'em-up video games, muscle cars and punk musicwhen they make their way into the Muslim world. Over the course of his journey, Poplak gets body-slammed by WWE fans in Afghanistan, hangs out with hip-hop artists in Palestine, headbangs to heavy metal in Cairo, discovers a world of extreme makeovers in Beirut, bowls with the chief of police in small-town Kazakhstan, and encounters a mysterious Texan who builds rocket-propelled Batmobiles for a clientele of sheikhs. With uproarious humor and keen cultural insight, Poplak asks some vital questions: How is American pop culture consumed and reinterpreted in the Islamic world? What does that say about how we are viewed by young Muslims? And can Homer Simpson bridge the divisions that are tearing our world apart?"

Until Julius Comes is a rollicking, unprecedented journey through the wilds of South African politics. With his sharp wit and perceptive observations, Richard Poplak exposes the tricks of the political trade and the skullduggery that comes with it.

Writing under the byline Hannibal Elector, he spares no one: Julius Malema looks like a ‘Teletubbie in his EFF onesie’; Jacob Zuma is a tasteless home renovator with ‘no access to a Woolworths lifestyle magazine’ and Helen Zille sends out ‘Braveheart vibes’ as she guides her troops into battle.

In vignettes that switch between the hilarious, the tragic and the terrifying, Poplak rips back the curtain and exposes the country for what it is: a bustling, contested and divided circus trying to find its way to wholeness.