There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Xolisa Guzula and Athambile Masola, Together Apart: The Story of Living in Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2024) NO one under 35 can have a first-hand understanding of life in apartheid South Africa. To many of today’s […]
Pieter du Toit, The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) STATE capture nearly bankrupted South Africa. Its mechanics and perpetrators were well documented by investigative journalists and then […]
Seán Morrow, The Bams of Grasslands Farm: A Family History (Johannesburg: Staging Post, 2024) WHAT might the course of South African history have been had the Christian African middle class of the nineteenth century been […]
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World (London: Allen Lane, 2024) DICTATORS and dictatorship are hardly new: they provided much of the darkness of the twentieth century, often in extreme […]
Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel (London: Penguin Viking, 2024) GEORGE Smiley, the anti-hero agent, appears in nine novels written by John le Carré who died in 2020. Smiley has a vast […]
Karyn Maughan, I Will Not Be Silenced (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) BETWEEN 2023 and 2024, the international press freedom monitoring organisation Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) downgraded South Africa’s rating from 25 to 38 among 180 […]
T.J. Strydom, Capitec: Stalking Giants (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) THE LIBERATION of the majority of South Africans after 1990 has all too often been seen in terms of the vote. This was always going to […]
Jonathan Jansen, Breaking Bread: A Memoir (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) This is the story of a transformational journey from exclusive fundamentalist religion to international inclusivity and a broad-minded approach to higher education. Jonathan Jansen’s parents […]
Patric Tariq Mellet, The Truth about Cape Slavery: The Foundations of Colonial South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) CAPE slavery has often been described as relatively benign, a sideshow to the main drama of South […]
Graham Coetzer, Hunting with the Hawks: Untold Stories from the Elite South African Crime-Fighting Unit (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) THE FAMED Scorpions, the Directorate of Special Operations which fell under the NPA and combined investigative […]