Search results for ""Wits University Press""

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more fl exible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor.If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, Authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot– the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost.The compulsion to forensically detect the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfi ction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens; this, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fi ctional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fi ction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.

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How do greenhouse gases regulate the Earth’s temperature? How hot will it get? Will South Africa run out of water? Isn’t climate change just part of a long-term natural cycle? Do cow-farts really cause global warming? Is sea-level rise something to worry about? Will marine fisheries collapse? Can solar and wind power meet our energy needs? How can I reduce my carbon footprint? Is there any chance of runaway global warming? These and many other questions are answered in this full-colour illustrated book.Climate change affects us all, but it can be a confusing business. Three leading South African scientists who have worked on the issue for over two decades help you to make sense of this topic. Climate Change: Briefings from Southern Africa takes the form of 55 ‘frequently-asked questions’, each with a brief, clear scientifically up-to-date reply. The authors’ introduction provides an overview of current national and international policies aimed at regulating climate change. The four main sections take you through the science of how the climate system works, the projected impacts in Southern Africa during the 21st century, what this means for South African society, and what can be done to avoid harm.The profuse illustrations and local examples help to explain complex issues in simple terms. The book is aimed at interested but non-scientist readers, including business people, decision-makers and students, and is very timely in relating to impending international treaties and national efforts to avoid the worst consequences of a changing climate.The year 2015 is regarded as a watershed for global climate change action if a global average temperature rise of more than two degrees above the pre-Industrial level is to be avoided. This book provides compelling evidence that the impact on agriculture, fisheries, water resources, human health, plants and animals as well as sea levels will be dangerous. However, the book ends on a positive note by offering advice on how the world can avoid such bleak outcomes, while allowing a good life for all.

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In no other society in the world have urbanisation and industrialisation 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 slaves. The essays and visual materials traverse homesteads, chiefdoms and mining hostels in their portrayal of migrant workers’ and their families’ attempts to maintain contact across large distances and uphold their rural customs, traditions and rituals in new spaces and locations. Together, they 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 the 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.

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Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce … (Karl Marx 1852) In the face of the continuing national tragedy of the inequality, poverty and unemployment which have triggered rising working- class discontent around the country, the ANC announced a ‘second phase’ of the ‘national democratic revolution’ to deal with the challenges. Ironically, the ANC post-Mangaung has resolved to preserve the core tenets of the minerals-energy-financial complex that defined racial capitalism – while at the same time ratcheting up the revolutionary rhetoric to keep the working class and marginalised onside. If the ‘first phase’ was a tragedy of the unmet expectations of the majority, is the ‘second phase’ likely to be a farce? The chapters in this volume are written by experts in their fields and address issues of politics, power and social class; economy, ecology and labour; public policy and social practice; and South Africa beyond its borders. They examine some of these challenges, and indicate that they are as much about the defective content of policies as their poor implementation. The third volume of the New South African Review continues the series by providing in-depth analyses of the key issues facing our country today.

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This book explores how political democracy, economic mobility (and lack thereof), cultural and demographic shifts have affected the making of racial identities in South Africa over the past two decades of freedom. To what extent do South Africans hold on to inherited racial identities; are they embracing newer identities; do they move back and forth without making clear-cut choices about one racial identity or the other? The binary division between colour consciousness and colour blindness does not capture the contradictions of multiple belonging and association that a freer society brings about. The contributors in this volume discuss how identity shifts or lack thereof play themselves out in institutions of government, the economy, civil society; and the extent to which public policy has facilitated or impeded the emergence of a more integrated, equitable society.

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While there are many studies of the global influence of crops and plants, this is perhaps the first social history based around a plant in South Africa. Plants are not quite historical actors in their own right, but their properties and potential help to shape human history. In turn, the trail of the prickly pear in South Africa has been profoundly affected by the plant’s biological characteristics. Plants such as the prickly pear tend to be invisible to those who do not use them, or at least on the peripheries of people’s consciousness. This book explains why they were not peripheral to many people in the Eastern Cape, and why a wild and sometimes invasive. plant from Mexico remains important to African women in shacks and small towns.

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Why does it matter that nations should care for their archives, and that they should develop a sense of shared identity? And why should these processes take place in the public domain? How can nations possibly speak about a shared sense of identity in pluralistic societies where individuals and groups have multiple identities? And how can such conversations be given relevance in public discussions of reconciliation and development in South Africa? These are the issues that the Public Conversations lecture series - an initiative of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project at Wits University - proceeded from in 2006. Five years later, cross currents in contemporary South Africa have made the resumption of a public debate to clarify the meanings of identity and citizenship even more imperative, and an understanding of 'archive' even more urgent. The 2006 lectures were subsequently collected, resulting in this volume which takes its title from Weber's point, elaborated on in the chapter by Benedict Anderson that the future asks us to be worthy ancestors to the yet unborn. The title, as did the lecture series, aims to reach a broad and informed reading public because the topic is still of pressing interest in contemporary public discourse. In a changed (and, some might say, degraded) environment of public dialogue, the editor hopes to inspire a re-thinking of the very essence of what it means to be a citizen of South Africa. Becoming worthy ancestors aims to make accessible the theoretically informed, sometimes highly academic work of its various contributors. With chapters from high profile international and local contributors, it will be of interest to South African and international audiences. Editing for publication has further enhanced the accessibility of each speaker's thinking without forfeiting any of its complexity, and the addition of an introductory chapter by the editor contributes to the coherence of the volume. While the target audience is the broad public, the book is based on a core of academic thinking and research.

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This original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. ""Entanglement"" aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the present. The author explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, she moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name. In the background of her investigations lies a preoccupation with a future-oriented politics, one that builds on largely unexplored terrains of mutuality while being attentive to a historical experience of confrontation and injury. This book works with the idea of entanglement - a rubric within which we can begin to meet the challenge of the 'after apartheid'. Entanglement offers a means by which to draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as separate come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways. It is an idea which signals largely unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from a common, though often coercive and confrontational, experience. It points away from a time of resistance towards a more ambivalent moment, in which the time of potential, both latent and actively surfacing in South Africa, exists in complex tandem with new kinds of closure and opposition.

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Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San analyses texts drawn from the Bleek and Lloyd Archive - arguably one of the most important collections for the understanding of South African cultural heritage and in particular the traditions of the /Xam, South Africa's 'first people'. Initially appearing in a now rare 1986 edition and here re-issued for the first time, the doctoral thesis on which the book is based became the catalyst for much scholarly research.The book offers an analysis of the entire corpus of /Xam narratives found in the Bleek and Lloyd collection, focusing particularly on the cycle of narratives concerning the trickster /Kaggen (Mantis). These are examined on three levels from the 'deep structures' with resonances in other areas of /Xam culture and supernatural belief, through the recurring patterns of narrative composition apparent across the cycle, and finally touching on the observable differences in the performances by the various /Xam collaborators. The exposition of the connections between these levels is cogently argued and richly supported by detailed reference to the ethnographic record specific to the /Xam. The work also contains two supporting ethnographic appendixes relating to beliefs and practices concerning shamans and girls' puberty observances.Hewitt's text remains the only comprehensive and detailed study of /Xam narrative, and it has become itself the object of study by researchers and Ph.D candidates in South Africa, the UK, Canada and elsewhere. This new edition at last makes Hewitt's important work more widely available. It will be a welcome addition to the recently burgeoning literature on the place of the /Xam hunter-gatherers in the complex history of South African culture and society.

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Steve Biko, father of the black consciousness philosophy, was killed in prison on 12 September 1977. Biko was only 30 years old, but his ideas and political activities changed the course of South African history and helped hasten the end of apartheid. This year, 2007, saw the 30th anniversary of Biko's death. To mark the occasion, the Minister of Science and Technology and President of Azapo, Dr. Mosibudi Mangena, commissioned Chris van Wyk to compile an anthology of essays as a tribute to the great South African son. Among the contributors are Minister Mangena himself, President Thabo Mbeki, writer Darryl Accone, journalists Lizeka Mda and Bokwe Mafuna, academics Jonathan Jansen, Achille Mbembe, Mandla Seleoane and Saths Cooper, a friend of Biko's and former president of Azapo. The essays cover a wide range of key moments in a significant time in South African history, both personal and public - being on trial with Biko, talking with him about his philosophy and his vision, listening to him speak from a podium. Some of the contributors never met Biko face to face but their accounts are nevertheless interesting as they describe the moment when Biko's philosophy captured their imaginations, as it swept through a generation hungry and eager for a new and dynamic way to fight oppression. We write what we like proudly echoes the title of Biko's seminal I write what I like. It is a gift to a new generation which enjoys freedom, from one that was there when this freedom was being fought for. And it celebrates the man whose legacy is the freedom to think and say and write what we like.

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The 'Cradle of Humankind' (COH), bordering Gauteng and the North-West Province in South Africa, was declared a World Heritage Site for the wealth of the human and animal fossils found there. Research based on fossils found in the area as well as signs of early human habitation have shed new light on the evolution of humankind and on the significant role that southern Africa played in the development of modern humans.""A Search for Origins"" aims to provide an overview of the history of the COH, and of the important discoveries that have been made there, for a non-specialist audience. A number of general accounts have been written which have concentrated on the palaeontological discoveries made there. No systematic account written by specialists in their disciplines has, however, been published about the wider history of the COH and surrounding areas.In particular, no overview spanning the evolution of early plant and animal life, human development, and recent and colonial history as reflected in discoveries linked to the COH, has been attempted.This edited volume frames the scientific advances that have been made in the COH against the intellectual and political background out of which they emerged. It places the COH within a recognisable South African context, which renders it a great deal more meaningful for both South African visitors and international tourists.The multi-disciplinary approach - from a wide range of specialists based in South Africa and the United Kingdom - is innovative and ground-breaking.

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Nothing but the Truth is a story of two brothers, of sibling rivalry, of exile, of memory and reconciliation, of perplexities of freedom.

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Much has been written about South Africa‘s ‘lost generation’ – the generation of politicised youth who dedicated their lives to the liberation of a nation, and who ‘lost’ everything in the process. Young Warriors is about this generation, but it is also a critique of the very concept of ‘lost generation’. While focussing on the lives of the men and women who lived in Diepkloof, a black township in South Africa, it is a narrative of many young black South Africans who ‘grew up’ in the organisations of the ANC-led liberation movement. It is also the story of activists who became leaders, provincial premiers and national ministers in our democratic society. Through extensive interviews and time spent in Diepkloof, Monique Marks documents the tales of a group of Charterist youth during the mid-eighties to early nineties. During this period participating in the Charterist youth movement fundamentally shaped these individuals’ lives and the future of their society. Marks revisits their lives at the beginning of the third millennium in a new democratic South Africa characterised by a radical decline in this social movement. Marks explores, from the point of view of the youths themselves, how and why township youth joined mass-based political organisations and how, through their involvement in these organisations, their lives and identities were shaped in significant ways. She examines in fascinating detail how youth planned and executed acts of political violence, who participated in these acts, and what justifications they offered for their involvement in collective violence. The involvement of politicised youth in acts of collective violence has led to speculation as to whether or not former activist youth are responsible for the increase in violent crime in contemporary South Africa. Young Warriors provides some tentative answers to questions about youth and crime.

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Was the ""mfecane"" a figment of historians' imagination as Julian Cobbing contends? How large a responsibility do Shaka and the Zulu people bear for the social turbulence in South-central and South-east Africa in the early decades of the 19th century? These are some of the issues explored in this collection, which is designed as a response to the radical critique of Dr Cobbing and other scholars. The ""mfecane"", suggests Cobbing, must be seen as a myth lying at the root of a set of interlinked assumptions and distortions that have seriously twisted our understanding of the main historical processes of late 18th- and early 19th-century Southern Africa. Contributors to this collection assess the implications of this critique for scholars from a range of disciplines, notably history, anthropology, archaeology, history of art and African languages. But the book is not only about the debate over Cobbing's work; it is also an indicator of the state of current scholarship in Southern Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries and, because it raises questions about the nature of sources and, indeed, about the nature of historical debate itself, it is also about historiography. This book should provide a useful guide for students starting out in this field, as well as a resource for established scholars seeking their way through the textual intricacies of varied editions and secondary texts that become the primary sources for historiographical debate.

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In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole elaborates on the problematic signifier X, a marker of the dehumanization of the black subject, and makes an argument for the struggle for Azania as a liberatory project. Azania refers to the land that became South Africa after its conquest by settler-colonialists. Sithole argues that post-1994 South Africa retains the markers of its colonial past and remains a territory of unfreedom for blacks. He shows that the colonial contract still stands, with the land question unresolved by the new constitutional dispensation. For Sithole, being and land are indissoluble, and the denial of the centrality of land restitution is a denial of the black being. Drawing on the Black Consciousness philosophy of Steve Biko, he critiques the manner in which Marx and Marxism evade the reality of antiblack racism and landlessness as drivers of colonial conquest and ongoing forms of oppression, and emphasises the existential struggle of the black subject as explicated in Mabogo P More’s African philosophy. Sithole gathers these iterations under the mark X, and shows how the black subject, as a dehumanized figure, continues to radically insist on alternative forms of being in an antiblack world, and on Azania as the true form of liberation.This timely and relevant book offers a way to rethink the meaning of liberation in a country that has yet to rename and redefine itself.

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Debates about decolonisation of the mind and of our curricula reveal the dark shadow cast over the world by the adventurers of the modern era, beginning in 1492. Decolonisation explores questions of justice, injustice and inhumanity that have geographically and intellectually shaped the course of history through overlapping colonial, decolonial and postcolonial eras.This multidisciplinary collection uses the lenses of history, philosophy, literature and education to examine aspects of colonialism and decolonisation, and their revolutionary and evolutionary manifestations which, contributors argue, occurred simultaneously in the historical and epistemological record. The problems that come into focus have a kaleidoscopic effect on how we come to understand fraught issues, from the ‘invention’ of blacks, to the formulation of the ideology of trusteeship and the obligations to ‘lower civilisations’. Decolonisation brings together an internationally renowned group of scholars to showcase their search for decolonial strategies within their disciplinary focus, covering ideas such as the different layers at which colonialism operates, strategies for a decolonisation that does not recolonise, and the importance of preserving and publishing in indigenous languages. This is a much-needed reference book for students and scholars in the field of decolonisation, history, philosophy and pedagogy. The introductory chapter offers a clear and concise primer to this complex subject, covering colonialism, imperialism, decoloniality, and the various actors involved.

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Isabel Hofmeyr is one of the world’s leading scholars on African print cultures, postcolonial literary histories, Indian Ocean studies and the oceanic humanities. For four decades and counting, her work has produced profound conceptual innovations from the global South and for the world at large.The essays gathered in Reading from the South are written in a blend of intellectual and personal modes, and mostly by scholars of Indian and African descent. Via their engagement with Hofmeyr’s path-breaking work, the essays in turn elaborate and contribute to studies of print culture as well as critical oceanic studies, consolidating their findings from the point of view of global South historical contexts and textual practices.The collection focuses on Hofmeyr’s life and work, her education and early career, her deep rootedness in place, and her political, creative and institution-building activities. The book captures Hofmeyr’s innovative and original scholarship through published works that address a range of topics: orality and literacy, feminist literary criticism, transnational histories of the book, South–South cultural connections, and the phenomenology of reading within the Indian Ocean world and, indeed, around the globe. After reading the collection as a whole, scholars in the field will have a much deeper appreciation of Hofmeyr’s work and the formidable contribution she has made to the study of African print cultures and oceanic humanities at large.

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The National Government moves to introduce segregated education galvanised the staff and students of the four ‘open universities’ to oppose any attempt to interfere with their autonomy and freedom to decide who should be admitted. In subsequent years, as the regime adopted increasingly oppressive measures to prop up the apartheid state, opposition on the campuses, and in the country, increased and burgeoned into a Mass Democratic Movement intent on making the country ungovernable. Protest escalated through successive states of emergency and clashes with police on campus became regular events. Residences were raided, student leaders were harassed by security police and many students and some staff were detained for lengthy periods without recourse to the courts. First published in 1996, WITS: A University in the Apartheid Era by Mervyn Shear tells the story of how the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) adapted to the political and social developments in South Africa under apartheid. This new edition is published in the University’s centenary year with a preface by Firoz Cachalia, one of Wits’ student leaders in the 1980s. It serves as an invaluable historical resource on questions about the relationship between the University and the state, and on understanding the University’s place and identity in a constitutional democracy.

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You Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock / Wathint’Abafazi, Wathint’Imbokodo is a bristling example of protest theatre making during the height of apartheid. Created in ensemble fashion in 1986 by director Phyllis Klotz in collaboration with performers Thobeka Maqhutyana, Nomvula Qosha and Poppy Tsira, this play stands as a contemporary South African classic.The play focuses on three central characters: Sdudla, Mambhele and Mampompo living and working in a Cape Town township trying to eke out a living in a racially, socially and economically unequal world. There are few work opportunities and there is a great deal of red tape to be self-sufficient. Men are glaringly absent from this world – working as cheap migrant labour in urban areas. Women have to undertake great risk to see their husbands and to try keep a semblance of family cohesiveness. Helicopters fly above and state security police surveil the area. The play shows how these women work miracles to ensure the survival and wellbeing of their families at all cost.Following the famous 1956 slogan of the South African woman’s march against apartheid laws, this latest publication in 2021 is a testament to the contemporariness of this play. Its themes around gender activism and the need for gender parity remains as true today as it did fifty years ago. Fresh and full of life, this is an important historical document and will be a landmark play for high schools and students of theatre.

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Seeking Sanctuary brings together poignant life stories from fourteen lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) migrants, refugees and asylum seekers living in Johannesburg. The stories, diverse in scope, chronicle each narrator’s arduous journey to South Africa, and their corresponding movement towards self-love and self-acceptance. The narrators reveal their personal battles to reconcile their faith with their sexuality and gender identity, often in the face of violent persecution, and how they have carved out spaces of hope and belonging in their new home country. In these intimate testimonies, the narrators’ resilience in the midst of uncertain futures reveal the myriad ways in which LGBT Africans push back against unjust and unequal systems. Seeking Sanctuary makes a critical intervention by showing the complex interplay between homophobia and xenophobia in South Africa, and of the state of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) rights in Africa. By shedding light on the fraught connections between sexuality, faith and migration, this ground-breaking project also provides a model for religious communities who are working towards justice, diversity and inclusion.

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South Africa's democracy is often seen as a story of bright beginnings gone astray, a pattern said to be common to Africa. The negotiated settlement of 1994, it is claimed, ended racial domination and created the foundation for a prosperous democracy - but greedy politicians betrayed the promise of a new society.In Prisoners of the Past Steven Friedman astutely argues that this misreads the nature of contemporary South Africa. Building on the work of the economic historian Douglass North and the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani, Friedman shows that South African democracy's difficulties are legacies of the pre-1994 past. The settlement which ushered in majority rule left intact core features of the apartheid economy and society. The economy continues to exclude millions from its benefits, while racial hierarchies have proved stubborn: apartheid is discredited, but the values of the pre-1948 colonial era, the period of British colonisation, still dominate. Thus South Africa's democracy supports free elections, civil liberties and the rule of law, but also continues past patterns of exclusion and domination. Friedman reasons that this 'path dependence' is not, as is often claimed, the result of constitutional compromises in 1994 that left domination untouched. This bargain was flawed because it brought not too much compromise, but too little. Compromises extended political citizenship to all but there were no similar bargains on economic and cultural change. Using the work of the radical sociologist Harold Wolpe, Friedman shows that only negotiations on a new economy and society can free South Africans from the prison of the past.

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What do African feminist traditions that exist outside the canon look and feel like? What complex cultural logics are at work outside the centres of power? How do spirituality and feminism influence each other? What are the histories and experiences of queer Africans? What imaginative forms can feminist activism take?Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection of essays dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theorist, Desiree Lewis, and poet and feminist scholar, Gabeba Baderoon, have curated contributions by some of the finest writers and thought leaders. Radical polemic sits side by side with personal essays, and critical theory coexists with rich and stirring life histories. By including writings by Patricia McFadden, Panashe Chigumadzi, Sisonke Msimang, Zukiswa Wanner, Yewande Omotoso, Zoë Wicomb and Pumla Dineo Gqola alongside emerging thinkers, activists and creative practitioners, the collection demonstrates a dazzling range of feminist voices. The writers in these pages use creative expression, photography and poetry in eclectic, interdisciplinary ways to unearth and interrogate representations of Blackness, sexuality, girlhood, history, divinity, and other themes. Surfacing is indispensable to anyone interested in feminism from Africa which, the contributors show, is in vivid and challenging conversations with the rest of the world.

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Part literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway: Novels by Black South African Women critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers. Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society. This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects. Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

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What does the world look like from Africa? What does it mean to think, feel, express without apology for being African? How does one teach society and children to be African – with full consciousness and pride? In institutions of learning, what would a textbook on African-centred psychology look like? How do researchers and practitioners engage in African social psychology, African-centred child development, African neuropsychology, or any area of psychology that situates African realities at the centre?Questions such as these are what eminent professor of psychology Kopano Ratele grapples with in this lyrical, philosophical and poetic treatise on practising African psychology in a decolonised world view. Employing a style common in philosophy but rarely used in psychology, the book offers thoughts about the ideas, contestation, urgency and desire around a psychological praxis in Africa for Africans. While Setting out a framework for researching, teaching and practicing African psychology, the book in part coaxes, in part commands and in part urges students of psychology, lecturers, researchers and therapists to reconsider and reach beyond their received notions of African psychology.

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What does the lawn want? To be watered, fertilised, mowed, admired, fretted over, ignored? This unusual question serves as a starting point for Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld, an unexpected and often disconcerting critique of one of the most common and familiar landscapes in South Africa. The lawn, Jonathan Cane argues, is not quite as innocent as we might think. Besides the fact that lawns suck up scarce water, consume chemicals, displace indigenous plants and reduce biodiversity, they are also part of a colonial lineage of dispossession and violence. They reduce the political problem of land to the aesthetic question of landscape, thereby obscuring issues of ownership, redress, belonging and labour. The question then becomes: Who takes care of whose lawn, in what clothes, under what conditions and for what reward?Civilising Grass offers a detailed reading of artistic, literary and architectural lawns between 1886 and 2017. The eclectic archive includes plans, poems, maps, gardening blogs, adverts, ethnographies and ephemera, as well as literature by Koos Prinsloo, Marlene van Niekerk and Ivan Vladislavić. In addition, the book includes colour reproductions of lawn artworks by David Goldblatt, Lungiswa Gqunta, Pieter Hugo, Anton Kannemeyer, Sabelo Mlangeni, Moses Tladi and Kemang Wa Lehulere. This book shows that even if the enchantment of a green, flat and soft lawn is almost universal, there are also unexpected moments when alternatives present themselves, occasions when people reject the politeness of the lawn, and situations in which we might glimpse a possible time after the lawn. Drawing on theory and conceptual tools from interdisciplinary fields such as ecocriticism, queer theory, art history and postcolonial studies, Civilising Grass offers the first sustained investigation of the lawn in Africa and contributes to the growing conversation about the complex relationships between humans and non-humans on the continent.

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Evil stalks the township of KwaMashu, near Durban. It comes in the form of Whoonga, a toxic mix of B-grade heroin, rat poison and other chemical components that almost immediately sucks its users into the vortex of addiction and the crime, deception and personal tragedy that goes with it. Caught up in the web, the ulwembu of the title, presided over by the dealer, Bongani Mseleku, are Lieutenant Portia Mthembu, a police officer in the frontline of the fight against the scourge; her son Sipho; his friend, Andile Nxumalo, and Emmanuel Abreu, a Mozambique-born spaza shopkeeper. As it traces Sipho’s descent from talented scholar and aspirant poet and songwriter to suicidal addict, Ulwembu explores the effects of addiction not only on those who suffer from it but on communities, families and the police, both those who try to control the murderous trade and those who benefit from it. Using a process they have dubbed Empatheatre, The Big Brotherhood, Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mtombeni, aim to share ‘people’s real-life stories, with the intention to inspire and develop a greater empathy and kindness in spaces where there is conflict or injustice’. Ulwembu is the dramatic result of their efforts.

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The transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid era has highlighted questions about the past and the persistence of its infl uence in present-day South Africa. This is particularly so in education, where the past continues to play a decisive role in relation to inequality. Between Worlds: German Missionaries and the Transition from Mission to Bantu Education in South Africa scrutinises the experience of a hitherto unexplored German mission society, probing the complexities and paradoxes of social change in education. It raises challenging questions about the nature of mission education legacies. Linda Chisholm shows that the transition from mission to Bantu Education was far from seamless. Instead, past and present interpenetrated one another, with resistance and compliance cohabiting in a complex new social order. At the same time as missionaries complied with the new Bantu Education dictates, they sought to secure a role for themselves in the face of demands of local communities for secular statecontrolled education. When the latter was implemented in a perverted form from the mid-1950s, one of its tools was textbooks in local languages developed by mission societies as part of a transnational project, with African participation. Introduced under the guise of expunging European control, Bantu Education merely served to reinforce such control.The response of local communities was an attempt to domesticate – and master – the ‘foreign’ body of the mission so as to create access to a larger world. This book focuses on the ensuing struggle, fought on many fronts, including medium of instruction and textbook content, with concomitant sub-texts relating to gender roles and sexuality. South Africa’s educational history is to this day informed by networks of people and ideas crossing geographic and racial boundaries. The colonial legacy has inevitably involved cultural mixing and hybridisation – with, paradoxically, parallel pleas for purity. Chisholm explores how these ideas found expression in colliding and coalescing worlds, one African, the other European, caught between mission and apartheid education.

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‘The silence of the cell is less disturbing than the deliberate silence of the human beings who come and go. I know that it is part of the process, designed to break my morale, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I calculate that I am speaking less than twenty words a day, and begin to wonder whether my vocal chords will dry up and wither if this goes on … I have never been very talkative, but now I begin to hunger after talk more strongly than for either food or drink.’Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein was arrested at Liliesleaf Farm, Rivonia, on 11 July 1963 and tried for sabotage, alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and other leaders of the African National Congress and Umkhonto we Sizwe in what came to be known as the Rivonia Trial. He was acquitted in June 1964, but was immediately rearrested. After being released on bail, he fl ed with his wife Hilda into exile, followed soon afterwards by their family. This classic text, fi rst published in 1999, is a remarkable man’s personal memoir of a life in South African resistance politics from the late 1930s to the 1960s. In recalling the events in which he participated, and the way in which the apartheid regime affected the lives of those involved in the opposition movements, Rusty Bernstein provides valuable insights into the social and political history of the era.

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This collection of six plays by one of South Africa’s leading playwrights and actors features works written between 1984 and 1993. Slabolepszy is a master of dialogue, capturing the essence of the personality and speech patterns of his protagonists in language that is often dramatic, frequently funny, sometimes tragic and always entertaining.The works included are Under the Oaks, Over the Hill, Boo to the Moon, Smallholding, Mooi Street Moves and The Return of Elvis du Pisanie.Elvis won Slabolespzy the 1992/93 IGI Life Vita Award for Play of the Year and, together with Mooi Street Moves, gained him the Vita Playwright of the Year award.This collection is introduced by Robert Greig, a well-known theatre critic, and by Bobby Heaney, who has been involved in the evolution of several of Slabolepszy’s plays.

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Paul Slabolepszy’s Suddenly the Storm set in Johannesburg’s East Rand at the home of an ageing former police offi cer Dwayne Combrink and his much younger wife Shanell, poses the question of whether the wounds of the past can ever truly be healed.Combative, volatile, constantly on the verge of exploding, Dwayne and Shanell Combrink are two halves of a white South African workingclass couple, living an uneasy truce as they struggle with the day-today trials of scraping together a living and dreaming competing dreams. But beneath Dwayne’s angry, violent exterior lies the heartbreak that governs his attitude to life. Dwayne is a man in mourning. Shanell believes his current level of despair was sparked by the death of his childhood friend and recent work partner, Jonas, but the source of his mourning and anger lies much further back. When the elegant and self-contained Namhla Gumede, born on 16 June 1976, arrives on their doorstep seeking answers to questions that have remained buried for 40 years, Dwayne and Shanell fi nally fi nd out the truth.What starts as a smouldering dark comedy suddenly turns into a roller-coaster ride of startling revelations, rage and recrimination … before the storm finally breaks.

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The book opens in China, 1962. Andrew Mlangeni is one of a small select group undergoing military training. The unannounced visitor is Mao Tse-Tung. While still at school, Andrew Mlangeni joined the Communist Party of South Africa and also the ANC Youth League. These were the organisations that shaped his values. Decades of resourceful activism were to lead to his arrest and life sentence in the Rivonia trial. Mlangeni’s lifelong commitment to the struggle for liberation reverberates with other biographies of leading figures. His perspective comes from a somewhat ambiguous position in the hierarchy of liberation leaders. Mlangeni was selected as one of the first-ever six members who received military training in China before the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe. He seems to have been chosen because he was a dedicated, intelligent and dependable operative, rather than a leader. Even after his release after 25 years on Robben Island, Mlangeni was not given a senior position in the post-apartheid democratic government. ‘I was always the backroom boy,’ says Andrew Mlangeni about himself. This story of an ANC elder is a rigorously researched historical record overlaid with intensely personal reflections which intersect with the political narrative. Above all, it is one man’s story, set in the maelstrom of the liberation struggle. This biographical project has been developed for, and published in conjunction with, the June and Andrew Mlangeni Foundation.

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Despite the transition from apartheid to democracy, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. Its extremes of wealth and poverty undermine intensifying struggles for a better life for all.The wide-ranging essays in this sixth volume of the New South African Review demonstrate how the consequences of inequality extend throughout society and the political economy, crippling the quest for social justice, polarising the politics, skewing economic outcomes and bringing devastating environmental consequences in their wake.Contributors survey the extent and consequences of inequality across fields as diverse as education, disability, agrarian reform, nuclear geography and small towns, and tackle some of the most difficult social, political and economic issues. How has the quest for greater equality affected progressive political discourse? How has inequality reproduced itself, despite best intentions in social policy, to the detriment of the poor and the historically disadvantaged? How have shifts in mining and the financialisation of the economy reshaped the contours of inequality? How does inequality reach into the daily social life of South Africans, and shape the way in which they interact? How does the extent and shape of inequality in South Africa compare with that of other major countries of the global South which themselves are notorious for their extremes of wealth and poverty? South African extremes of inequality reflect increasing inequality globally, and The Crisis of Inequality will speak to all those – general readers, policy makers, researchers and students – who are demanding a more equal world.

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Labour Beyond Cosatu is the fifth publication in the Taking Democracy Seriously project which started in 1994 and comprises of surveys of the opinions, attitudes and lifestyles of members of trade unions affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). This survey was conducted shortly before the elections in 2014, in a context in which government economic policy had not fundamentally shifted to the left and the massacre of 34 mineworkers at Marikana by the South African Police Service had fundamentally shaken the labour landscape, with mineworkers not only striking against their employers, but also their union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Cosatu leaders had started to openly criticise levels of corruption in the State, while a ‘tectonic shift’ took place when the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) was expelled from Cosatu at the end of 2014.In its analysis of the survey, Labour Beyond Cosatu shows that Cosatu, fragmented and weakened through fi ssures in its alliance with the African National Congress, is no longer the only dominant force infl uencing South Africa’s labour landscape. Contributors also examine aspects such as changing patterns of class; workers’ incomes and their lifestyles; workers’ relationship to civil society movements and service delivery protests; and the politics of male power and privilege in trade unions.The trenchant analysis in Labour Beyond Cosatu exhibits fiercely independent and critically engaged labour scholarship, in the face of shifting alliances currently shaping the contestation between authoritarianism and democracy.

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The re-emergence of debates on the decolonisation of knowledge has revived interest in the National Question, which began over a century ago and remains unresolved. Tensions that were suppressed and hidden in the past are now being openly debated. Despite this, the goal of one united nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. This volume examines the way in which various strands of left thought have addressed the National Question, especially during the apartheid years, and goes on to discuss its relevance for South Africa today and in the future. Contributors have defined the question as they believe appropriate, which has resulted in a rich tapestry of interweaving perceptions about the unresolved National Question. The volume is structured in two parts. The first examines four foundational traditions – Marxism-Leninism (the Colonialism of a Special Type thesis); the Congress tradition; the Trotskyist tradition; and Africanism. The second part explores the various shifts in the debate from the 1960s onwards, and includes chapters on Afrikaner nationalism, ethnic issues, Black Consciousness, feminism, workerism and constitutionalism. By revisiting these debates, the volume will become a catalyst for an enriched debate on our identity and our future.

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Traumatic stress and post-traumatic stress more particularly, has gained international prominence as a condition or disorder that affects people across the globe in the wake of exposure to extreme life events, be these collective or individual. Given the history of political violence in South Africa, extremely high levels of violence against women and children and the prevalence of violent crime, South Africa has the unfortunate distinction of being considered a real life laboratory in which to study traumatic stress. Taking both a historical and contemporary perspective, the title covers the extent of and manner in which traumatic stress manifests, including the way in which exposure to such extremely threatening events impacts on people's meaning and belief systems. Therapeutic and community strategies for addressing and healing the effects of trauma exposure are comprehensively covered, as well as the particular needs of traumatised children and adolescents. Illustrative case material is used to render ideas accessible and engaging. Traumatic stress in South Africa provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of theory and practice in the field of traumatic stress studies, incorporating both international and South African specific findings. The particular value of the text lies in the integration of global and local material and attention to context related challenges, such as how trauma presentation and intervention is coloured by cultural systems and class disparities. The text would be of particular interest to scholars and practitioners working with traumatic stress in developing countries or in settings in which assessment and intervention resources are limited. The book highlights both psychological and sociopolitical dimensions of traumatic stress and emphasises insights derived from working in the South African context that have potential relevance for shaping the direction of traumatic stress studies.

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Dorothea Bleek’s selection of |xam narratives from the well-known Bleek and Lloyd Collection were originally published in the journal Bantu Studies during the 1930s. Decades later, Jeremy Hollmann collated and edited these extracts, adding notes on each of the narratives as well as Dorothea Bleek’s ‘sketch ‘of |xam grammar. The first edition of his book was published in 2004.This substantially revised second edition integrates new scholarship on the Bleek and Lloyd archive, and restores previously omitted material. The introduction to each narrative is expanded to contextualise it within the archive as a whole and, where relevant, reference it to the Notebook of which it is a part. The texts are critically reassessed, with additional notes and commentaries, particularly on English translations of the |xam language. Customs and Beliefs of the |xam, second edition, is an in-depth, authoritative resource that will be invaluable to scholars, heritage workers and activists.

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What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship.Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

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Dorothea Bleek (1873 to 1948) devoted her life to completing the ‘bushman researches’ that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. this research was partly a labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenthcentury Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea’s commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called ‘bushmen’. How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied? These are some of the questions with which Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea’s life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fi eldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in south Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman’s life, and argues that Dorothea’s life work – her study of the bushmen – was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.

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Many universities in South Africa have acquired new works of art for key spaces on their campuses. These works convey messages about the advantages of cultural diversity, but recently acquired sculptures, paintings and tapestries also critically engage with histories of racial intolerance and conflict. A current concern among tertiary South African institutions is the influence of British imperialism or Afrikaner nationalism on aspects of their inherited visual culture. Discussions from within the art world around the curatorship of art, memorials, insignia and regalia has shed light on these outmoded colonial value systems which universities now wish to distance themselves from. In Picturing Change, Brenda Schmahmann explores the implications of deploying the visual domain in the service of transformative agendas. In other words, how do universities reflect, through the visual objects on their campuses, on their revisionist aims and endorsements of cultural diversity? While most new commissions are innovative, there have been instances in which universities in South Africa have acquired works of art with potentially traditionalist – even backward-looking – implications. And while imperatives to remove inherited imagery may be underpinned by a wish to unsettle white privilege, there have in fact been occasions in which such actions have served to maintain the status quo. Further, while many expected that a post-apartheid era would have freed artists from censorship, some images produced or shown under the auspices of universities have in fact been susceptible to proscription for supposedly articulating hate speech. Schmahmann identifies and analyses a range of approaches taken by universities and commissioned artists towards these ‘troublesome’ visual objects .This study is the first to consider imagery at a range of tertiary institutions in the country, and it is unique in its exploration of a transformative ethos in the visual domain at universities. It will be invaluable to readers interested in public art and the politics of curating and collecting, and also to those concerned with the challenges involved in transforming contemporary universities into spaces welcoming of diversity in South Africa.

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This volume contains cutting edge contributions that consider new approaches to three areas: the documentation of rock art; its interpretation using indigenous knowledge; and the presentation of rock art. Working with Rock Art is the first edited volume to consider each of these areas in a theoretical rather than a technical fashion, and it therefore makes a significant contribution to the discipline. The volume aims to promote the sharing of new experiences between leading researchers in the field. While the geographic focus is truly global, there is a dominant north-south axis with strong representation from researchers in southern Africa and northern Europe, two leading centres for new approaches in rock art research. Working with Rock Art opens up a long overdue dialogue about shared experiences between these two centres, and a number of the chapters are the first published results of new collaborative research. Since this volume covers the recording, interpretation and presentation of rock art, it will attract a wide audience of researchers, heritage managers and students, as well as anyone interested in the field of rock art studies.

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In the twenty years of transitional and democratic politics in South Africa, Susan Booysen constantly traversed two worlds, as direct observer and analyst-researcher. First, there is the world of the African National Congress (ANC), in which there is a sense of representation of the people in the contexts of elections and modern government. In ANC parlance, this is the time of the ‘national democratic revolution’ and there is continuous progress.The other world is that of critical observation and analysis. Here the observer-researcher negotiates the route between counter-truths, assessing how the ANC’s hegemonic power project of close to a century has materialised in the period of government power. It is a shifting target that is being analysed. The ‘answers’ are often at variance with the officially-projected ANC perspectives. The ANC and the Regeneration of Political Power straddles both worlds, but is unapologetically analytical. It builds on the empathy of understanding the struggles and achievements along with deferred dreams and frustrations. It moves to analyses of power, victories, strategy, engineering, manipulation, denials and corrections, obfuscation … and causes for celebration. Anchored in this world, the book focuses on discerning the bigger picture, which transcends the daily and monthly variances of who is in power and who in favour with those who are in power. Booysen has constructed the book around the framework of political power. Her analysis focuses on how the ANC, in twenty years of political power, has acted to continuously shape, maintain and regenerate power in relation to its internal structures and processes, opposition parties, people, government and the state.The chapters are all anchored in ongoing research and monitoring over this period, sometimes from the sidelines, but at other times with one foot in the political sphere.In 2011 the power configurations of and around the ANC are converging to deliver a present that holds vexing uncertainties. By dissecting contemporary power dimensions and comparing them with what has gone before, Booysen explores the construction of the political power ‘complex’ of the ANC. In so doing she offers insights into how South African politics, which is in many ways synonymous with the politics of the ANC, is likely to unfold in years, possibly decades, to come.

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The second volume of the New South African Review (NSAR) continues a tradition of debate and critical, analytical scholarship about contemporary South Africa. Drawing on authors from academia and beyond, it aims to be informative, discursive and provocative. In this volume, the New Growth Path (NGP) adopted by the South African government in 2010 provides the basis for a debate about whether 'decent work' is the best possible solution to South Africa's problems of low economic growth and high unemployment. Rising inequality is explored against the backdrop of the failings of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE). The NGP's proposals for 'greening the economy' are discussed, with emphasis on the creation of 'green jobs' and biofuels. The volume also includes investigations into the crisis of acid mine drainage on the Witwatersrand, and other persistent environmental challenges. Possibilities for participatory forms of government are surveyed, and civil society activism is explored in relation to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and environmental campaigns. The crisis in child care in public hospitals, the difficulties that characterise attempts at building relationships between the police and a township community, and the problems related to the absence of legislation to govern the powers of traditional authorities over land allocation (through the experience of the Eastern Cape) are also featured. Asking whether the NGP reflects a set of new policies or an attempt to re-dress old (com)promises in new clothes, this volume brings together different voices in debate about possibilities for alternatives to neo-liberal and capitalist development in South Africa.

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South Africa’s future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange or will India inevitably dominate? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? South Africa and India addresses these questions and offers new approaches for researching transnational histories.

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Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is the most influential sociologist of our time. His works take in education, culture, sport, literature, painting, class, philosophy, religion, law, media, intellectuals, methodology, photography, universities, colonialism, kinship, schooling and politics. Not much remains outside Bourdieu's sociological eye. His works are widely read across disciplines and he was one of the most prominent public intellectuals in France.Conversations with Bourdieu presents the first comprehensive attempt at a critical engagement with Bourdieu's theory as a totality. Michael Burawoy constructs a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and his nemesis, Marxism, from which he silently borrowed so much. Starting with Marx, and proceeding through Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, de Beauvoir, and Mills, Burawoy takes up the challenge Bourdieu presents to Marxism, simultaneously developing a critique of Bourdieu and a reconstruction of Marxism. Karl Von Holdt, in turn, brings these conversations to South Africa, showing the relevance of Bourdieu's ideas to a country he never visited. Armed with Bourdieu, Von Holdt takes up some of the most pressing social and political issues of contemporary South Africa: the relation between symbolic and real violence, the place of intellectuals in public life, the intervention of gender in politics, the grappling with race, the critique of education, the importance of habitus, the history and future of class mobilisation, and the legacy of the liberation struggle. Conversations with Bourdieu pioneers a distinctive approach to doing social theory that is neither a combat sport nor an artificial synthesis, but a way of pushing theory to its limits through dialogue; dialogue between theorists and dialogue between theory and the world it represents.The book is distinctive too in pointing towards a new global sociology consciously rooted in a dialogue between the social realities and theoretical perspectives of North and South. The conversations were first presented as Mellon Lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2010

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0||The aim of this volume is to examine nascent movements, genre shifts, developing authors/playwrights and controversial themes as they emerged in both drama and theatre. The editors have focused on the essence of creative nexus of London from the end of the nineteenth century up to the beginning of the Great War (1914). The resultant study discusses Gordon Craig and production design, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Pinero, Strindberg,Harley Granville Barker,Jones, Archer, Ford Madox Ford, D.H.Lawrence,Galsworthy, Sims, women playwrights, popular theatre among other topics. The work complements J.L.Styan s 3 volume Modern Drama in Theory and Practice and is more focused on late 19th/early 20th c transitions and dramatic breakthroughs than Modern British Drama of Christopher Innes.

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For nearly ten years - indeed more if we include his period of influence under Mandela's presidency - Thabo Mbeki bestrode South Africa's political stage. Despite attempts by some in the new ANC leadership to airbrush out his role, there can be little doubt that Mbeki was a seminal figure in South Africa's new democracy, one who left a huge mark in many fields, perhaps most controversially in state and party management, economic policy, public health intervention, foreign affairs and race relations. If we wish to understand the character and fate of post-1994 South Africa, we must therefore ask: What kind of political system, economy and society has the former President bequeathed to the government of Jacob Zuma and to the citizens of South Africa generally? This Question is addressed head-on here by a diverse range of analysts, commentators and participants in the political process. Amongst the specific questions they seek to answer: What is Mbeki's legacy for patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class and gender? How, if at all, did his presidency reshape relations within the state, between the state and the ruling party and between the state and society? How did he reposition South Africa on the continent and in the world? This book will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the current political landscape in South Africa, and Mbeki's role in shaping it.

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The Constitution of post-apartheid South Africa declares the Republic to be 'a sovereign, democratic state' founded on 'human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms; non-racialism and non-sexism'. After centuries of white domination and decades of increasingly savage repression, freedom came to South Africa far later than elsewhere in the continent - and yet was marked by a commitment to non-racialism. Nelson Mandela's Cabinet and government were made up of women and men of all races, and many spoke of the birth of a new 'Rainbow Nation'. How did this come about? How did an African nationalist liberation movement resisting apartheid - a universally denounced violent expression of white supremacy - open its doors to other races, and whites, in particular? At what cost to itself? And what did non-racialism mean - why could whites, coloureds and Indians not join the African National Congress (ANC) until after 1990, when the ANC was unbanned, but had to remain racially discrete 'partners' - while fighting for a non-racial future? Why could members of all races join the Communist Party and the Liberal Party - but not the ANC? This book uncovers some of the stories and hidden histories that help explain our past. It focuses on a talented, brave, but tiny minority of whites - liberals, radicals, communists, Trotskyists, humanists, Christians, idealists - who rejected the growing racism of post-war South Africa and worked to breach the dividing line between black and white. From the Torch Commando, which could mobilise tens of thousands of whites at the beginning of the 1950s, to the Liberal Party and Congress of Democrats, which could boast only a few hundred members by the end of the decade, white activists fought to maintain the vision of racial equality in an increasingly divided society. Their African nationalist allies fought a harder battle within the ANC and other organisations, under growing pressure from Africanists and others, to keep alive the notion that black and white could struggle together and could live peacefully side by side. Together, black and white activists developed a theory of struggle and ways of mobilising that somehow kept alive the ideal of a non-racial South Africa. The democratic state ushered in after 1994 can be traced back directly to the work they undertook in the 1950s and after.

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The management of South Africa's elephants is a lightning-rod for a whole range of associated values-based policy issues pertaining to elephant in South Africa. The results of this comprehensive work will pave a way to better resolution of these controversial issues. The research has been thoroughly peer-, stakeholder- and publicity reviewed. It contains contributions from an expert author team comprised of many of the world's leading specialists, including biologists, environmentalists, ethicists, economists and lawyers. This title explores a range of topics: synthsising, evaluating and summarizing knowledge on the biology and ecology of elephants, elephant effects on trees, other herbivores, birds and ecosystem function, management techniques and the social, economic and ethical implications various options. Elephant management is the first of its kind and topical both nationally and internationally. The anticipated readership is broad, including not only conservation policymakers and practitioners in South Africa and Africa, but also postgraduate students in many parts of the world, researchers and academics, conservation NGO's, and members of the public.The title is likely to become required reading for university courses on related topics.

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