Showing titles in Africa

Charles van Onselen clinically reconstructs the world of the night trains, which were run as a partnership between the mining houses and the railways. By tracing the up and down rail journeys undertaken by black migrants over half a century it is possible to discern how racial thinking, expressed logistically, reflected South Africa’s evolving systems of segregation and apartheid. Mirroring the brutal logic of industrial capitalism, this was a system of transport designed to maximise profit at the expense of the health, well-being and even the lives of those it conveyed.

When we hear of Jamaica or the Caribbean, we think of beautiful islands of paradise with sun, sea and sand, reggae music, cannabis, and "irie" people like Usain Bolt - people who are living out their best dreams, desires, and lives. But this book analyzes this motif, given the historical and current economic and political situation in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and the "Global South". In an attempt to escape the adverse realities of poverty, inequality, and injustice, the people of the Global South find themselves in north metropolises with very little agency.

In a carefully choreographed propaganda video released in February 2015, ISIS militants behead twenty-one orange-clad Christian men on a Libyan beach. In the West, daily reports of new atrocities may have displaced the memory of this particularly vile event. But not in the world from which the murdered came. All but one were young Coptic Christian migrant workers from Egypt. Acclaimed literary writer Martin Mosebach traveled to the Egyptian village of El-Aour to meet their families and better understand the faith and culture that shaped such conviction.

From the myths told about Africa’s past to the erasure of Black contributions, The Miseducation of the Black Diaspora uncovers how colonial narratives continue to shape the identity and history of Africa's diaspora worldwide. Drawing on the author's personal experience and global events, the book challenges distorted truths and urges its listeners to reclaim and embrace their heritage as a way of resisting mental colonisation. The Miseducation of the Black Diaspora by Tawanda Bwerudza exposes racism’s roots, and empowers identity and pride.

An outrageous miscellany of serious and light-hearted lies, myths, untruths, fibs and fabrications that tells the tall tale of South Africa. The fibs come thick and fast, like a burst sewerage pipe: Why everything we've learnt about Shaka Zulu, 'Africa's Napoleon', is a pack of lies. Back in the darkest of ages (the 1970s!), citizens were told that there were satanic messages if you played some of The Beatles songs backwards. National icon Hansie Cronje was a paragon of virtue and integrity … until he wasn't.

This is the first definitive account of Zuma’s catastrophic misrule, offering eyewitness descriptions and cogent analysis of how South Africa was brought to its knees–and how the people fought back.

Born in exile, in Zambia, to a guerrilla father and a working mother, Sisonke Msimang is constantly on the move. Her parents, talented and highly educated, travel from Zambia to Kenya and Canada and beyond with their young family. Always the outsider, and against a backdrop of racism and xenophobia, Sisonke develops her keenly perceptive view of the world. In this sparkling account of a young girl's path to womanhood, Sisonke interweaves her personal story with her political awakening in America and Africa.

In Foreign Native, RW Johnson looks back with affection and humour on his life in Africa. From schooldays in Durban - fresh off the boat from Merseyside - to later years as an academic, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation and formidable political commentator, he has produced an entertaining and occasionally eye-popping memoir brimming with history, anecdote and insight. Johnson charts his evolution from enthusiastic, left-leaning Africanist to political realist, relating the episodes that influenced his intellectual worldview.

Adam Habib, the most prominent and outspoken university official through the recent student protests, takes a characteristically frank view of the past three years on South Africa's campuses in this new book. Habib charts the progress of the student protests that erupted on Wits University campus in late 2015 and raged for the better part of three years, drawing on his own intimate involvement and negotiation with the students, and also records university management and government responses to the events.

In Being There, Tony Leon goes behind the scenes, reflecting on how history is made, both here and around the world, through his unique mixture of anecdote and informed opinion. His vantage point ranges from a ringside seat in the formation of the government of national unity (GNU)—recounted in detail here for the first time—to close encounters with the likes of Harry Oppenheimer, Yasser Arafat and Boris Johnson, and reappraisals of FW de Klerk, Nelson Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

R.W Johnson’s best-selling How Long Will South Africa Survive? was hailed by financial writer Alec Hogg as 'a masterpiece in unblemished reality'. Published at the height of the Zuma presidency, it accurately forecast that South Africa’s credit rating would be downgraded to junk status. Johnson warned that this sorry progress might end in an IMF bailout and wholesale change to the political system.

In July 1994, Thomas P. Odom was part of the U.S. Embassy team that responded to the Goma refugee crisis. He witnessed the deaths of 70,000 refugees in a single week. In the previous three months of escalating violence, the Rwandan genocide had claimed 800,000 dead. Now, in this vivid and unsettling new book, Odom offers the first insider look at these devastating events before, during, and after the genocide.

Give Us More Guns, based on hundreds of interviews with police, experts, and the gangsters themselves, tells the story of this callous crime for the first time. Mark Shaw explores how the guns get into the hands of South Africa’s crime bosses and describes the bloodshed that ensues. He also uncovers accounts of rampant corruption within the police and in the state’s gun-licensing system, probing the government failure that has been instrumental in arming the country’s gangsters.

The powerful and timely story of Peter Hain's political life fighting South African apartheid and modern-day corruption. Peter Hain has had a dramatic 50-year political career, in Britain and his native South Africa. This is the story of that extraordinary journey, from Pretoria to the House of Lords. Hain vividly describes his anti-apartheid parents’ arrest and harassment in the early 1960s, the hanging of a close white family friend, and enforced London exile in 1966.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER “This work is important and astonishing, but it is also a riveting read.” —Louise Penny, author of A World of Curiosities and the Inspector Gamache novels Behind the Beautiful Forevers meets Under an Afghan Sky in this mesmerizing true story of the Nigerian girls...

Nigerian politicians are caught in an evil cycle, and the consequences are dire. The purpose of government should be to protect its people, but what is happening in a country where resources are so abundant yet so wasted? In this incisive look at years of corruption and project mismanagement, Dr. Darlington Akaiso clearly outlines the problems inherent in this vicious cycle.

In 1968, two young medical students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination. Their love story is also the story of the founding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) by a group of 15 principled and ambitious students at the University of Natal in Durban in the early 1970s.

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissene Habre, the former despot of Chad, terrorized, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight years in power—while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habre's overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their quest for justice would be long, tense, and unnerving, but they would not back down.

Millions of Black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country's democratic transition.

Pour la première fois, des enregistrements historiques de Léopold Sédar Senghor sont remis à la disposition du public sous la direction de Philippe Sainteny dans le cadre des émissions radiophoniques de RFI. Les archives sonores, ici réunies, de l'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel et de Radio France Internationale, nous permettent de redécouvrir l'une des figures marquantes de l'Afrique contemporaine.