There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Trevor Ngwane, Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2021) HAVING visited 46 informal settlements to discover that three quarters have popular committees, and just one no committee at all, Trevor Ngwane […]
Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad (London: Fourth Estate, 2021) The title of this substantial book is a double entendre. It uses the words […]
John R. Schlapobersky, When They Came for Me: The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2021) IN John Schlapobersky’s case they came on Friday 13 June 1969 in the middle of a […]
Tyrone August, Dennis Brutus: The South African Years (Cape Town: BestRed, 2020) ALTHOUGH renowned as a poet, political activist, journalist and teacher, with a life story that is relatively well-known, Dennis Brutus has proved an […]
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 […]