The Mandela Files


Book Description

Political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro s personal tribute to the great man of our time




The Mandela Collection


Book Description

Nelson Mandela's death dominated our thinking at the close of 2013. These two short books provide informed, objective insight into the making of the man, and his unparalleled impact on our world. Tom Lodge's book presents a host of fresh insights about the influences that shaped the man.




Nelson Mandela


Book Description

The New York Times bestselling author celebrates Mandela’s liberation and his fight for freedom with this collection of rare and historic photographs. On February 11th, 1990, Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison after serving twenty-seven years for his struggle against apartheid in South Africa. This beautifully illustrated volume commemorates that event and Mandela’s inspiring life and work. Created by renowned author David Elliot Cohen—who has worked with many of the top photojournalists who chronicled the “apartheid battles”—Nelson Mandela contains many images that have rarely, if ever, been seen, as well as the iconic photos that came to define this chapter in history. This volume also includes the full text of Mandela’s six most important speeches, an essay on his historic significance, and a detailed overview of the struggle against apartheid.




Long Walk to Freedom


Book Description

"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.




Resistance


Book Description

In Resistance: Sol Plaatje and South Africa, Shane Moran studies Sol Plaatje, the founding secretary of what was to become the African National Congress (ANC), and his work within the context of colonial politics and resistance. Arguing for a return to the study of one of the founders of anti-racism, Moran explores issues of land reform, human rights, and the legacy of colonialism. Through an in-depth analysis of Plaatje’s resistance to racial domination, Moran examines the nature of the struggles that continue within and beyond South Africa today. In particular, Moran analyzes events from the beginning of the previous century that shaped post-1994 South Africa, such as the resolution of the ANC to expropriate land without compensation.




Ghosts of Archive


Book Description

Ghosts of Archive draws on the discourses of deconstruction, intersectionality and archetypal psychology to mount an argument that archive is fundamentally and structurally spectral and that the work of archive is justice. Drawing on more than 20 years of the author’s research on deconstruction and archive, the book posits archive as an essential resource for social justice activism and as a source, or location, of soul for individuals and communities. Through explorations of what Jacques Derrida termed ‘hauntology’, Harris invites a listening to the call for justice in conceptual spaces that are non-disciplinary. He argues that archive is both constructed in relation to and beset by ghosts – ghosts of the living, of the dead and of those not yet born – and that attention should be paid to them. Establishing a unique nexus between a deconstructive intersectionality and traditions of ‘memory for justice’ in struggles against oppression from South Africa and elsewhere, the book makes a case for a deconstructive praxis in today’s archive. Offering new ideas about spectrality, banditry and archival activism, Ghosts of Archive should appeal to those working in the disciplines of archival science, information studies and psychology. It should also be essential reading for those with an interest in social justice issues, transitional justice, history, philosophy, memory studies and postcolonial studies.




Mandela's Kinsmen


Book Description

Mandela's Kinsmen is the first study of the fraught relationships between the ANC leadership and their relatives who ruled apartheid's foremost "tribal" Bantustan, the Transkei. In the early 20th century, the chieftaincies had often been well-springs of political leadership. In the Transkei, political leaders, such as Mandela, used regionally rooted clan, schooling and professional connections to vault to leadership; they crafted expansive nationalisms woven from these "kin" identities. But from 1963 the apartheid government turned South Africa's chieftaincies into self-governing, tribal Bantustans in order to shatter African nationalism. While historians often suggest that apartheid changed everything - African elites being eclipsed by an era of mass township and trade union protest, and the chieftaincies co-opted by the apartheid government - there is another side to this story. Drawing on newly discovered accounts and archives, Gibbs reassesses the Bantustans and the changing politics of chieftaincy, showing how local dissent within Transkei connected to wider political movements and ideologies. Emphasizing the importance of elite politics, he describes how the ANC-in-exile attempted to re-enter South Africa through the Bantustans drawing on kin networks. This failed in KwaZulu, but Transkei provided vital support after a coup in 1987, and the alliances forged were important during the apartheid endgame. Finally, in counterpoint to Africanist debates that focus on how South African insurgencies narrowed nationalist thought and practice, he maintains ANC leaders calmed South Africa's conflicts of the early 1990s by espousing an inclusive nationalism that incorporated local identities, and that "Mandela's kinsmen" still play a key role in state politics today. Timothy Gibbs is a Lecturer in African History, University College London. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana




Walter & Albertina Sisulu


Book Description

This is well-told story and an important historical record of the struggle for a democratic South Africa.




Taking African Cartoons Seriously


Book Description

Cartoonists make us laugh—and think—by caricaturing daily events and politics. The essays, interviews, and cartoons presented in this innovative book vividly demonstrate the rich diversity of cartooning across Africa and highlight issues facing its cartoonists today, such as sociopolitical trends, censorship, and use of new technologies. Celebrated African cartoonists including Zapiro of South Africa, Gado of Kenya, and Asukwo of Nigeria join top scholars and a new generation of scholar-cartoonists from the fields of literature, comic studies and fine arts, animation studies, social sciences, and history to take the analysis of African cartooning forward. Taking African Cartoons Seriously presents critical thematic studies to chart new approaches to how African cartoonists trade in fun, irony, and satire. The book brings together the traditional press editorial cartoon with rapidly diverging subgenres of the art in the graphic novel and animation, and applications on social media. Interviews with bold and successful cartoonists provide insights into their work, their humor, and the dilemmas they face. This book will delight and inform readers from all backgrounds, providing a highly readable and visual introduction to key cartoonists and styles, as well as critical engagement with current themes to show where African political cartooning is going and why.




On Literary Attachment in South Africa


Book Description

This book reflects on the "literary" in literature. Less ideologically construed, more affirmative of literary attachment, the study adopts a style of intimacy – its "tough love" – in a correlation between the creative work and the critical act. Instead of configuring literary works to "state-of-the-nation" issues – the usual approach to literature from South Africa – the chapters keep alive a space for conversation, whether accented inwards to locality or outwards to the Anglophone world: the world to which literature in South Africa continues to belong, albeit as a "problem child". A postcolony that is not quite a postcolony, South Africa is richly but frustratingly textured between Africa and the West, or the South and the North. Its literature – hovering on the cusp of its locality and its global reach – raises peculiar questions of reader reception, epistemological and aesthetic frame, and archival use. Are the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee local writers or global writers? Is the novel or the short story the more appropriate form at the edges of metropolitan cultures? Given language, race, and culture contestation, how do we recover Bushman expression for contemporary use? How to consider the aesthetic appeal of two contemporaneous works, one in English the other in isiXhosa, the one indebted to Bloomsbury modernism the other to African custom? How does Douglas Livingstone attach the Third World to the First World in both science and poetry? What has a "born free" novelist, Kopano Matlwa, got to do with the Bard of Avon? In a time of theorisation, is it permissible for Lewis Nkosi to embody literary criticism in an autobiographical journey? How to read the rupturing event – the statue of Rhodes must fall – through a literary sensibility? Alert to the influence of critique, the study is equally alert to the "limits of critique". Reflecting on several writers, works, and events that do not feature in current publications, On Literary Attachment in South Africa releases literature to speak to us today, within the contours of its originating energy.