From Protest to Challenge, Vol. 2


Book Description

From Protest to Challenge rescues from obscurity the voices of protest in South Africa through the publication of rare documents housed in the collections of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. These excerpts from political ephemera, radical newspapers, and other materials provide a documentary history of opposition groups in South Africa. They bear witness not only to a remarkable period in South African history but also to the vital need for the preservation of historical documents as an essential tool of scholarship. These materials are as relevant today as when they were first published, graphically demonstrating the South African struggle for peace, freedom, and equality. Volume 2 covers the years 1935 to 1952, a period framed by the All-African Convention, arranged in response to proposed legislation limiting the rights of native Africans, and the launch of the Defiance Campaign protesting apartheid laws.




From Protest to Challenge, Vol. 1


Book Description

This remarkable collection of material is as relevant today as when it was first published; graphically demonstrating the native African's struggle for peace, freedom, and equality in his native land during the 19th and 20th centuries.




The Long Road to Freedom


Book Description

Inkundla Ya Bantu was the only independent African journal to play a significant role in the resistance press against the white minority government. It was launched in 1938 as a moderate African nationalist community paper and would cease publication in 1951, just seven months before the launch of the Defiance Campaign. Ime Ukpanah tells the story of the paper and the people who founded it, later to be key figures in the ANC. Having no official press of its own, the ANC adopted Inkundla Ya Bantu as its PR organ.




Discordant Comrades


Book Description

This title was first published in 2000: This book considers the fortunes of socialism in South Africa from the doctrine’s arrival around 1900 to its legal suppression in 1950. Socialism’s universal claims had to come to terms with South Africa’s singular national experience in which a racial ideology and a racial division of the working class played a far greater role than in any other country. The left in South Africa had to deal with all the complexities of ideology and strategy that faced their counterparts in Europe and North America; but in South Africa it was further vexed by challenges of profound racial and national inequalities and a white labour movement which sought protection through racial segregation. Communism, rather than Social Democracy, prevailed; hence the reverberations of the splits in the Communist International were far more debilitating in South Africa than anywhere else. In the years after World War II African nationalism became the dominant influence on the South African left, chiefly through the relationship between the ANC and the Communist Party. Discordant Comrades draws on a wide range of primary sources from inside and outside South Africa, including the archives of the Communist International in Moscow. The result is a scholarly and challenging analysis of the South African left.




Young Mandela


Book Description

Nelson Mandela is well-known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world's elder statesman -- the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first black president in South Africa. But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. And, in Young Mandela, award-winning journalist and author David James Smith takes us deep into the heart of racist South Africa to paint a portrait of the Mandela that many have forgotten: the committed revolutionary who left his family behind to live on the run, adopting false names and disguises and organizing the first strikes to overthrow the apartheid state. Young Mandela lifts the curtain on an icon's first steps to greatness.




Mandela


Book Description

Nelson Mandela, who emerged from twenty-six years of political imprisonment to lead South Africa out of apartheid and into democracy, is perhaps the world's most admired leader, a man whose life has been led with exemplary courage and inspired conviction. Now Anthony Sampson, who has known Mandela since 1951 and has been a close observer of South Africa's political life for the last fifty years, has produced the first authorized biography, the most informed and comprehensive portrait to date of a man whose dazzling image has been difficult to penetrate. With unprecedented access to Mandela's private papers (including his prison memoir, long thought to have been lost), meticulous research, and hundreds of interviews--from Mandela himself to prison warders on Robben Island, from Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo to Winnie Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, and many others intimately connected to Mandela's story--Sampson has composed an enlightening and necessary story of the man behind the myth.




Thabo Mbeki


Book Description

What happens to a dream deferred? This question, from one of Thabo Mbeki's favourite poems by Langston Hughes, provides the thread for this magisterial biography of the second president of a democratic South Africa. In the long shadow of Nelson Mandela, Mbeki attempted to forge an identity for himself as the symbol of modern Africa. Mark Gevisser brings to life the voices and places that made Thabo Mbeki: the frontier of the Eastern Cape; 'Swinging' Britain and neo-Stalinist Moscow in the 1960s; the fraught world of African exile; the confusion of the transition. He examines the meaning of home and exile; of fatherhood and family. He tells the story of South Africa's black elite over a turbulent century - from 'black Englishman' to revolutionaries to heads of state - and Mbeki's own transition from doctrinaire communism to economic liberalism. Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is a work of deep scholarship and a gripping, highly readable story. By tracing the path of Mbeki's life, it sheds new light on his political personality and provides unprecedented insight into the dramatic role he has played in South African history.




The Land is Ours


Book Description

The Land Is Ours tells the story of South Africa’s first black lawyers, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an age of aggressive colonial expansion, land dispossession and forced labour, these men believed in a constitutional system that respected individual rights and freedoms, and they used the law as an instrument against injustice. The book follows the lives, ideas and careers of Henry Sylvester Williams, Alfred Mangena, Richard Msimang, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Ngcubu Poswayo and George Montsioa, most of whom were also members of the ANC. It analyses the legal cases they took on, explores how they reconciled the law with the political upheavals of the day, and considers how they sustained their fidelity to the law when legal victories were undermined by politics. The Land Is Ours shows how these lawyers developed the concept of a Bill of Rights, which is now an international norm. Amid current suspicion of the Constitution and its protection of individual rights, the book clearly demonstrates that, from the beginning, the struggle for freedom was based on the ideas of constitutionalism and the rule of law.




Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement


Book Description

Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.




Equal subjects, unequal rights


Book Description

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book focuses on the ways in which the British settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa treated indigenous peoples in relation to political rights, commencing with the imperial policies of the 1830s and ending with the national political settlements in place by 1910. Drawing on a wide range of sources, its comparative approach provides an insight into the historical foundations of present-day controversies in these settler societies.