The Murder of Ahmed Timol
Imtiaz A. Cajee, The Murder of Ahmed Timol: My Search for the Truth (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2020) AN inquest in 1972 returned a verdict of suicide. The re-opened inquest in 2017 concluded that murder had been […]
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=The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police
Jacob Dlamini, The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2020) DURING eight months in 1993, following a verbal command to destroy all operational records, South Africa’s state […]
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=Unspeakable: The Autobiography
John Bercow, Unspeakable: The Autobiography (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2020) THE FORMER Speaker of the House of Commons is often described as a Marmite figure. By that measure (in a frank declaration of reviewer interest) I […]
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=Undeniable: Memoir of a Covert War
Philippa Garson, Undeniable: Memoir of a Covert War (Jacana, 2020) A CONSTANT presence in this book is the question of the third force. Was it, in the period leading up to South Africa’s first democratic […]
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=Advantage Play: Technologies that Changed Sporting History
Steve Haake, Advantage Play: Technologies that Changed Sporting History (Arena Sport, 2018) PHYSICS and materials science meet sport in a book written with a strong dose of personal experience, a great deal of enthusiasm and […]
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=Maverick Africans: The Shaping of the Afrikaners
Hermann Giliomee, Maverick Africans: The Shaping of the Afrikaners (Tafelberg, 2020) HERMANN Giliomee deploys the acute observation that nations are created not just from their own dynamics, but also by their enemies. He raises the […]
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=The ANC Spy Bible
Moe Shaik, The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving across Enemy Lines (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2020) A MEMOIR might be loosely regarded as autobiography with benefits; or, in more literary terms, poetic licence. Any biographical account described […]
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=Voices from the Underground
Shirley Gunn and Shanil Haricharan, Voices from the Underground: Eighteen Life Stories from Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Ashley Kriel Detachment (Cape Town: Penguin, 2019) The MK unit known as the Ashley Kriel Detachment (AKD) had a […]
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=Will South Africa be Okay?: 17 Key Questions
Jan-Jan Joubert, Will South Africa be Okay?: 17 Key Questions (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2019) THIS book has a novel approach to South Africa’s current condition: responses to the most frequently asked questions posed to political […]
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=In Defence of Open Society
George Soros, In Defence of Open Society (John Murray, 2019) A LIST of George Soros’s low-life detractors – from big fish like Vladimir Putin to small fry like Julius Malema flourishing in a groundswell of […]