There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Dominique Malherbe, Searching for Sarah: The Woman who Loved Langenhoven (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2021) SARAH (Saartjie) Eva Goldblatt was born in London on Christmas Day 1889 to a Jewish family that emigrated to South Africa […]
Robert Schapiro, Secrets from the Cockpit: Pilots Behaving Badly and Other Flying Stories (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2021) WHEN I was young, we dressed up in our best clothes to travel by plane. Passengers were treated […]
Jeremy Vearey, Into Dark Water: A Police Memoir (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2021) THIS is a curate’s egg of a book. Correctly sub-titled as memoir, it is the work of a former MK soldier and ANC […]
Evert Kleynhans, Hitler’s Spies: Secret Agents and the Intelligence War in South Africa,1939–1945 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2021) MILITARY history does not have a fashionable profile and tends to be circumscribed, but Evert Kleynhans argues for […]
Peter Hain and André Odendaal, Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) THIS book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exclusion of apartheid South Africa from world cricket. At first […]
Mxolisi R. Mchunu, Violence and Solace: The Natal Civil War in Late-Apartheid South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2020) TWO main narratives frame the civil war that engulfed the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in the late […]
Mignonne Breier, Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2021) THE BROAD sweep of apartheid history is well-known and debated. But there remain many silences, particularly around […]
Henry Brown, A Lawyer’s Odyssey: Apartheid, Mandela and Beyond (Pietermaritzburg: Otterley Press, 2020) THE APARTHEID era produced a stream of political trials ranging from the mundane to the highly dramatic. It was not difficult to […]
Martin Plaut, Dr Abdullah Abdurahman: South Africa’s First Elected Black Politician (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2020) HIS funeral in Cape Town in February 1940 attracted a massive multiracial crowd. He had been a dedicated Cape Town city […]
Joyce Piliso-Seroke, Jwara!: Induna’s Daughter (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2020) THE AUTHOR of Jwara!, a clan name, was born in 1933 into her father’s second house, part of the Eastern Cape African Christian bourgeoisie. Her father, […]