An exciting new collection of profiles from one of the countries most talented and innovative journalists, Bongani Madondo. Bongani has spent his life stalking and studying icons and celebrities of our age. He’s risked his health chasing celebrities, weirdoes, icons and revered personalities from bathrooms to tropical islands to present this collection of in-depth interviews and profiles. Along the way he’s endured a political tirade from Danny Glover, gone in search of a lost comic book hero, and cried with Busi Mhlongo.In some interviews the line between journalist and interviewee has blurred. At other times, Bongani has managed to break through the mask and reveal the real Brenda Fassie, a reflective Zolani Mahola or a just-out-of-bed John Perlman. In the process he’s tried to work out what the thugs, dice-rollers, showbiz pimps, spiritual visionaries and other celebrated God-figurines have to offer the world. Beyond the genius, the arrogance, the foolishness, the fears, the jealousy and the madness, what is it that makes us worship them?Bongani Madondo is a tireless journalist and a breath of fresh air in the world of cultural commentary. He is at once the ultimate fan, a loyal disciple and a scathing critic.
Native Life in South Africa is one of South Africa’s great political books. First published in 1916, it was first and foremost a response to the Native’s Land Act of 1913 and was written by one of the most gifted and influential writers and journalists of his generation. Native Life in South Africa provides an account of the origins of this crucially important piece of legislation and a devastating description of its immediate effects. Plaatje spent many weeks traveling in the countryside and the most moving chapters in the book tell us what he saw. His book explores the wider political and historical context that produced policies of the kind embodied in the Land Act, and documents meticulously steps taken by South Africa’s rulers to exclude black South Africans from the exercise of political power.
Dreams, Miracles and Jazz is an anthology of new writing in English from writers born in Africa or of African parentage.Stories from emerging voices including previous Caine prize winners, Binyavanga Wainana, Segun Afolabli and Brian Chikwava; writers who have since secured book deals, like Sefi Atta, and others whose work has won awards and is found regularly in national and international anthologies such as Biram Mboob and Mamle Kabu.The anthology is diverse thematically, covering almost all the major contemporary African issues such as AIDS, migration (both within and outside of the continent), land issues and identity. There is the tragic as well as the comic, but what runs through them all is the writers' love and optimism for their continent, their belief in its future. Here are stories from Africa's emerging international voices, telling stories in both traditional and new ways, paying homage to those who have gone before, yet forging ahead along their own dynamic new paths ofstorytelling. Good storytelling to be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates good fiction and wonderful writing.
Footprints and Fingerprints includes a wide selection of Mabuza’s poems from a period of over thirty years. In this collection she explores the nature of South Africa’s journey to democracy and her own personal role in the struggle. Mabuza firmly states her beliefs, intelligently explores the sensitivities of the struggle, takes issue with weak leaders and celebrates the strong. She opens herself up and speaks of love in various moods, and her faith that love will ‘breed new life’. This a powerful, engaging and moving collection of poems that remembers South Africa’s painful past, and celebrates our exciting future.
“I was born on page 23 of my brother’s book. On page 52, before the whole world, I betrayed him.”
My Brother’s Book tells a story of betrayal and atonement that spans the lives of two siblings from their nomadic childhood in the Eastern Cape in the 1960s, to their adulthood in 2004 in Johannesburg. While the nation struggles to come to terms with its past, Lily struggles with her guilt about her careless betrayal of her brother, Tom, which destroyed his life and their relationship. Tom confronts this fraught past by writing a memoir. But both Lily, and Tom’s former lover Miranda, take issue with the way his book remembers their shared pasts. The two women begin to unravel “the way it really was”. They tell a story of love and loss, of revolutionary fervour – and failure.
As the past unravels, so do Tom’s certainties about his relationship to his estranged family and to his nation. His life is thrown into further confusion and chaos as Lily uncovers a secret that will force him to confront his past.Jo-Anne Richards has written a poignant and evocative tale of the ways in which seemingly minute choices can destroy lives and relationships. My Brother’s Book explores the most intimate aspects of betrayal and deception set against the backdrop of a nation striving to understand the consequences of its terrible and traumatic past. My Brother’s Book is both tragic and intensely hopeful as it charts its characters’ paths from guilt and betrayal to atonement and redemption.
The Lost Colours of the Chameleonis set on the fictitious island of Bangula in the Indian Ocean - an island populated by an indigenous community that coexists uneasily with Creoles, mainly descendants of ancient Portuguese colonizers. The half-a-million inhabitants live under the twin shadows of an impending cyclone and an outbreak of the blood plague. The novel follows the story of the Colonel Gondo, a patriarch who is the father of the newly reformed nation of Bangula, and the biological father of three sons (one legitimate and two illegitimate). Following their father’s death, the Colonel’s three sons become embroiled in a bitter succession struggle. Abioseh succeeds the Colonel, but has to contend with the Colonel's love-child, a boy called Zebulon. Zebulon grows up embittered and poverty-stricken, with an aim of avenging his mother, Madu, who died of official neglect. Zebulon, Abioseh's half-brother, is popular among the people for the simple reason that he has made it his life's mission to comfort the bereaved, even strangers. Abioseh also has to contend with the Colonel’s third son, Hieronymus Jerome, his childhood friend, who rises in the police ranks and becomes his head of security. However, Hieronymus also has ambitions of power - not so much to wield it conspicuously as to control the wielders of power, an eminence grise - who liaises with an undertaker to topple Abioseh and install Zebulon as leader of the island. This struggle for power is fuelled by the varying and personal motives of the Colonel’s three sons, and reveals the fundamental divisions tearing apart the fragile nation.The Lost Colours of the Chameleon is a gripping and sophisticated satire of politics in the developing world. It is a brave and timeous novel that is also compelling, entertaining and engaging and which takes the South African novel into new and exciting territory.
In 1950’s South Africa,the colour of a killer’s skin matters more than justice . . .
Whenan Afrikaans police captain is murdered in a small South African country town,Detective Emmanuel Cooper must navigate his way through the labyrinthine racialand social divisions that split the community. And as the National Partyintroduces the laws to support the system of apartheid in the early 1950’s,Emmanuel struggles – much like Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko – to remain agood man in the face of astonishing power. In a considered but very commercialnovel, Malla Nunn combines a compelling plot with a thoughtful and complexportrayal of a fascinating period of history, illustrating the human desiresthat drive us all, regardless of race, colour or creed.
Of an estimated 1 billion people in the world who are trapped ina cycle of grinding poverty and despair, a disproportionate number live insub-Saharan Africa.
In this innovative and challenging account, Moeletsi Mbeki analyses the plight of Africa andconcludes that the fault lies not with the mass of its people but with itsrulers – the political elites who contrive to keep their fellow citizens poorwhile enriching themselves.
Concentrating mainly on South Africa, his country of birth, and Zimbabwe, his home when he was inexile, Mbeki tells a tale of lost opportunities and extinguished hopes.
Yet Mbeki is no Afro-pessimist. Along with his candid exposé ofthe problems, he poses some suggestions about what needs to be done to breakthe stranglehold of the African elites on political power and to setsub-Saharan Africa once more on the road todevelopment.
“Blood, sex, music, disease, miracles,murder, poverty, race, profit, beauty. These are the narratives ofpost-apartheid South Africathat hang on Manny’s walls. They are bewildering and illogical, impossible andbizarre, and still they cohere—because whatever the country is, it is not London or Durham or the EastVillageon a humid evening in June.”
A story at once deeply personal andedifyingly public, Ways of Staying isone man’s journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined.From the murder of the author’s cousin in 2006 to the hills of Zululand mereweeks after the death of historian David Rattray, from the fateful ruling partyshowdown at Polokwane in 2007 to the xenophobic attacks of winter 2008, here isa book that ventures far beneath the headlines and into the very marrow of astrange and troubled land.
And yet it is in these dark placeswhere few care to look that Kevin Bloom meets men and women who believe that South Africa’shistory can be overcome, men and women who are engaged in the act of imaginingsome kinder future.
At times brutal and raw, at timestender and compassionate, Ways of Stayingis in the final analysis a love song to a country that will not beforsaken.
The Steve BikoMemorial Lecture, an annual program of the Steve Biko Foundation, is a seriesof lectures by some of the international community’s foremost scholars,artists, religious and political leaders. The lectures explore theenduring legacy and leadership of Stephen Bantu Biko in a contemporarycontext.
The Steve BikoMemorial Lectures, Edition 1 is a compilation of some of the most memorablelectures delivered at the event since its inception in 2000, including thoseof:
Professor NjabuloNdebele
Professor ChinuaAchebe
Professor ZakesMda
Professor Ngugi waThiong’o
President NelsonMandela
Dr. MamphelaRamphele
ArchbishopEmeritus Desmond Tutu
President ThaboMbeki
Minister TrevorManuel.
Described as aresuscitative moment, the series probes the inextricable link between theindividual and society; the challenges and opportunities that face developingnations; and attempts to define the mandate for this generation ofleadership.
This book ispublished in commemoration of the life and legacy of Stephen Biko in the hopethat it will contribute to realising the purpose for which Steve Biko lived anddied: restoring people to their true humanity.
The Shadow Follows is set in contemporary South Africa and deals with many pertinent and topical issues. These include identity, the relationship between past and present, problems of guilt and forgiveness, and the preoccupation with newness and remaking. These questions have been addressed by many post-apartheid writers; however, they are explored in this novel in a very original way. The style is accessible, even at its most dense or ‘poetic’, and there is a careful balance of the poignant and the humorous.
“A Blade of Grass”
Lewis DeSoto
1770100261 Trade Paperback March 2006 Southern Africa
Marit Laurens is a young woman of British descent who comes to live with her husband, Ben, on their newly purchased farm along the border of South Africa. Shortly after her arrival, violence strikes at the heart of Marit's world. Devastated and confused but determined to run the farm on her own, Marit finds herself in a simmering tug of war between the local Afrikaner community and the black workers who live on the farm, both vying for control over the land in the wake of tragedy. Marit's only supporter is her black housekeeper, Tembi, who, like Marit, is alone in the world. Together, the women struggle to hold on to the farm, but the quietly encroaching civil war brings out conflicting loyalties that turn the fight for the farm into a fight for their lives.
“When a Crocodile Eats the Sun”
Peter Godwin
1770100040 Trade Paperback October 2006 Southern Africa
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is a story of the disintegration of a family, set against the collapse of a country. Peter Godwin is living in Manhattan when he returns to Zimbabwe, his birthplace, having received the news that his father is dying. He finds the former breadbasket of a continent entering a vortex of violent chaos and famine. But his parents refuse to leave their home.
Against this backdrop, Godwin discovers a fifty-year-old family secret: his father’s identity is an invention. This Anglo-African colonial in a safari suit and desert boots is, in fact, a Polish Jew whose family was torn apart by the Holocaust.
Peter Godwin’s powerful, moving memoir describes dark times and dark aspects of human behaviour spanning two continents and half a century; it is a searing portrayal of a son’s effort to rescue his family, and a family’s struggle to belong in a hostile land.
'Fools’, the title story in this collection, is a tale of generations in the struggle against oppression. Zamani is a middle-aged teacher who was once respected by the community as a leader of the future. Then he disgraced himself, and now he's haunted by the impotence of his present life. A chance meeting brings him up against Zani, a young student activist whose attempts to kindle the flames of resistance in Charterston Location are ludicrously impractical. Both affection and hostility bind Zamani and Zani together in an intense and unpredictable relationship. Finding each other means finding the common ground of their struggle. It also means reexamining their lives - and, notably, their relationship s with women.'The Test', 'The Prophetess', and 'The Music of the Violin' all deal with formative experiences in a township childhood: an act of courage and endurance; a close encounter with an awe-inspiring old woman; a choice which must be made between the narrow ambitions of middle-class parents and the challenge of the township streets, at once more inviting and more dangerous.'Uncle' celebrates the gift of one generation to another: a gift that mingles music with other adventures of the spirit, recklessness with resourcefulness, and laughter with wisdom.
In 1997, three years after the birth of the new South Africa, a haunted, twenty-eight year old Eva Van Rensburg returns home, after a decade long absence to see her father dying. Set on a remote farm on the banks of the Limpopo river, this novel explores the lives of the inhabitants of Skinner's Drift and reveals the corrosive nature of the brutal secret that shattered the Van Rensburgs and bled into the lives of the African family that worked for them.
“Snakepit”
Moses Isegawa
1770100113 Trade Paperback October 2005 Southern Africa
After graduating from Cambridge University Bat returns to his native Uganda. Employed as a bureaucrat he soon finds himself as a pawn for wider control. Snakepit is a chilling account of one man's experience of Uganda under Marshall Amin's regime.
“GraceLand”
Chris Abani
1770100083 Trade Paperback July 2004 Southern Africa
This is the dazzling debut by one of the most talented new voices to emerge from Africa. Beautifully written and haunting, this novel is set in Maroko, a sprawling, swampy and colourful ghetto of Lagos, Nigeria, and unfolds against a backdrop of lush reggae and highlife music, American movies and a harsh urban existence.
“Contact Wounds”
Jonathan Kaplan
1770100121 Trade Paperback May 2005 Southern Africa
WINNER OF THE 2002 ALAN PATON AWARD for The Dressing Station. Surgery carries more individual responsibility than any other field of medicine. Jonathan Kaplan studied medicine in South Africa, and after working in a township and being drafted by the South African army he chose exile rather than serving the apartheid state. He travelled the globe in search of sanctuary, experiencing riots, tropical fevers, political upheaval and a jungle search for a lost friend. Contact Wounds is an account of these travels. Immediate, haunting and wryly funny, the book is simultaneously a vivid illustration of how to mess up a promising medical career, and an account of survivial - Kaplan's own as well as that of his patients. Contact Wounds is a stirring testament of adventure, discovery and survival - a visceral account of a career devoted to saving people caught in the crossfire of war.
CO-PUBLICATION WITH Wits University Press Phillip Tobias is arguably South Africa’s most honoured and decorated scientist. He is best known for his pioneering work at South Africa’s famous fossil hominid sites, such as Sterkfontein, and for his quarter-century partnership with Louis and Mary Leakey, studying their fossils from Tanzania and Kenya. Over his career Tobias has developed a reputation as one of the world’s leading authorities on the evolution of humankind, and he is also justly proud of his ‘ten thousand children’, the students who have been taught by him. In Reminiscences of a Bone-Picker, he focuses on the first 40 years of his life: from his troubled childhood in Durban and Bloemfontein to his intense student days at the University of the Witwatersrand and the many researches, travels and correspondence of his early career. He vividly recounts his interactions with some of the great names in twentieth century science – such as Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, Wilfrid LeGros Clark and Theodosius Dobzhansky – as well as their impact on him. Through his dedication to the people of Africa, Tobias opens windows on the San (Bushmen) of Botswana, the Tonga of Zambia, and recounts his role in the fight against racism during the harrowing decades of South Africa’s apartheid regime. The anecdotes, experiences and philosophies Tobias reveals portray a many-sided scholar and humanist, whose scientific achievements are matched by his love of people, teaching, books, theatre, music, travel – and tea and cricket.
Never before has the reality of the Transatlantic Slave Trade been so vividly captured as in Manu Herbstein’s epic adventure Ama. Through a successful blend of extensive, meticulous research and abundant imagination, Herbstein tells the story of a girl's and, later, a woman's life through the horrors of slavery and her growth and battles in the attainment of self liberty. Ama is as much about the violence of colonialism, patriarchy, female sexuality or gendered reproduction, economic production and the site of imperial contest, racial difference, as it is about resistance. Ama's journey allows us to read the complexities and contradictions of a time, where all classes, free and slave, women and men, black and white are interrelated in a complex dynamic that results from relations of power.
“Gem Squash Tokoloshe”
Rachel Zadok
1770100237 Trade Paperback October 2005 Southern Africa
A poignant and heart-wrenching story of the dissolution of a marriage seen through the eyes of an innocent child. She just sat there hardly moving, staring at the drive. Black marks formed under her eyes where her lashes bled their waxy coating onto her skin. Her rouged cheeks were smudged. Mother looked like she was melting in the heat. Faith leads an isolated existence on her family’s drought stricken farm in the Northern Transvaal of South Africa. When the rain stopped, her father took to the road as a travelling salesman, returning only at weekends. Now Faith lives with her mother Bella and dog Boesman anticipating his visits - until one day he stops coming and Bella’s health begins to go into rapid decline. Fifteen years later Bella has died incarcerated in the Sterkfontein asylum for the criminally insane. Faith has not spoken to her mother for ten years and is on the brink of a breakdown of her own. Now, with her mother’s death, she inherits the farm and must return to confront the dark mysteries of the past . . . In prose as lithe and imaginative as that of Alexandra Fuller, Rachel Zadok recreates the voice of a young girl growing up in South Africa. As Faith struggles to make sense of the complex world in which she lives and come to terms with the beliefs her society and upbringing have inculcated in her, what emerges is a richly compelling, emotionally resonant tale of courage set against the backdrop of a chaotically divided and deeply beautiful country.
This is a delightful memoir of one boy's special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbours - often decidedly quirky - who made up his community of Riverlea, and of the important role laughter and humour played during the years he spent in bleak and dusty townships.
“People Who Have Stolen From Me”
David Cohen
0958470855 Trade Paperback May 2004 Southern Africa
In People Who Have Stolen From Me, journalist David Cohen looks at his native country through the microcosm of Jules Street, at once the longest straight street in Johannesburg and a rambunctious thorough-fare on which crooked men thrive.
Ahmed Essop's third novel is set in post-apartheid South Africa. In this satirical work he creates a fictional political party which convincingly wins the second democratic election.
"Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight" is about living through a civil war and coming to the realisation that the side you have been fighting for may well have been the wrong one. It is a story of optimism and faith; of one family's quixotic battle against nature and loss, and their unbreakable bond with the continent.
“Scribbling the Cat”
Alexandra Fuller
1770100016 Trade Paperback September 2004 Southern Africa
When Alexandra "Bo" Fuller was in Zambia a few years ago visiting her parents, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him: "Curiosity scribbled the cat," he told Bo. Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian War. With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her such acclaim for "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight", Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.
To Every Birth its Blood is an outstanding exploration of a revolutionary society. It was written over a period ofd six years and combines Serote's piercing subjectivity of earlier works with a broad canvas of characters and time sequences.
This is a collection of Steve Biko's columns entitled I Write What I Like published in the journal of the South African Student Organisation under the pseudonym of 'Frank Talk'. It also contains other journal articles, interviews and letters written by Steve Biko at the time. It includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a new introduction by Nkosinathi Biko.
The resonance of Call Me Woman is as great in 2004 as when first published in 1985. It tells the important history, not only of one woman struggling under apartheid, but of millions who faced similar challanges.
Down Second Avenue is the autobiography of a man born and brought up in South Africa, on the wrong side of the colour line. Covering his early life as a tribal herd boy to his high academic honours and a post on the magazine 'Drum', Mphahlele has created an immensely readable work and literay classic.
Nat Nakasa once wrote: 'I may shut up for some time because of fear. Yet even this will not make me feel ashamed. For I know that as long as the ideas remain unchanged within me, there will always be the possibility that, one day, I shall burst out and say everything that I wish to say - in a loud and thunderous voice.'
In this collection of some of the finest writings by Nat Nakasa, that loud and thunderous voice speaks with such clarity and insight as to create a book that has been read and reread since its first appearance in 1975. The World of Nat Nakasa is at once deft, humorous and compassionate.
Picador 2007 new titles
