Of Tricksters, Tyrants and Turncoats

Of Tricksters, Tyrants and Turncoats
Author: Max du Preez
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2010-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1770201378

The sequel to the bestselling Of Warriors, Lovers and Prophets, this is a collection of more fascinating, colourful - and mostly unknown - historical tales, all meticulously researched and written in a lively and engaging style. There are stories of Khoikhoi who tried - with mixed fortunes - to integrate into early Cape colonial society, and eccentric Europeans who ventured to the turbulent interior. Readers will meet the Xhosa mystic and war-doctor Makhanda, who nearly succeeded in taking Grahamstown from the British in 1819; and the chieftainess Mantatisi, who led her people to military victories during the upheavals of the nineteenth century. Also featured are the Johannesburg-based Foster Gang, who were indirectly responsible for the killing of Boer hero Koos de la Rey; and the men who pulled off the biggest jewellery heist of the time, stealing Bridget Oppenheimer’s jewels in 1956. Of Tricksters, Tyrants and Turncoats spans more than three hundred years of history, concluding with an account of the man who exposed South Africa’s controversial arms deal. Once again, Max du Preez brings the past to life, proving that history can be more interesting - and more fun - than fiction.

Brothers in Arms

Brothers in Arms
Author: Chris Schoeman
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1770223428

At the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1899, a large number of Hollanders and Dutch expatriates joined the Boers, their reasons ranging from loyalty to their common ancestry to strong anti-British sentiments and a search for adventure. Brothers in Arms documents the trials and tribulations of these volunteers – most of them unaccustomed to the harsh landscape and climate of South Africa. Quotations and personal anecdotes from their diaries and memoirs vividly bring to life their hardships on commando, the thunder and chaos of battle, and the trauma of comrades falling around them. Some of the prominent figures in the book are Cornelius van Gogh, brother of the painter Vincent van Gogh; the Dutch artist Frans Oerder, who became the Transvaal’s first official war artist; Jochem van Bruggen, four-times winner of the coveted Hertzog Prize for Afrikaans literature; and Rev. Herman van Broekhuizen, who played rugby for South Africa in 1896 and later served as South African ambassador in The Hague. Brothers in Arms covers the full spectrum of the Hollanders’ roles as soldiers at the various battle fronts, ambulance personnel and military attachés, and their life in prisoner-of-war camps overseas.

Indigenous Concepts of Education

Indigenous Concepts of Education
Author: Berte van Wyk
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2014-08-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 113738218X

Featuring in-depth examinations of concepts of knowing, learning, and education from a range of cultures worldwide, this book offers a rich theory of indigenous concepts of education, their relation to Western concepts, and their potential for creating education that articulates the aspirations of communities and fosters humanity for all learners.

Dear Edward

Dear Edward
Author: Paul Weinberg
Publisher: Jacana Media
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2012
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 143140554X

A personal journey into the family archives of a talented photographer, this book explores Paul Weinberg's past as he retraces his family's footprints to far-flung small towns in the interior of South Africa--where his ancestors found a niche in the hotel trade. Part visual narrative and part multilayered travel book, this record is organized in the form of postcards to Weinberg's great grandfather, Edward. Weaving history, historiography, and memoir into a personal pilgrimage, it sets up a dialogue between the past and present and questions who records history and who is left out of it. The family's hotels are also revisited within these pages, and their evolution explored.

Pale Native

Pale Native
Author: Max du Preez
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2011-02-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1770201416

Max du Preez has one hell of a story to tell. In his career as a renegade reporter, he’s survived three dismissals, seven libel suits, thirteen criminal cases, four aeroplane crashes, a bombing, two assassination attempts and was a regular on right-wing hit lists. He was in Soweto on 16 June 1976, witnessed the debauched parties of apartheid cabinet ministers, and stepped over dead bodies in a bombed Angolan village. He looked into apartheid killer Dirk Coetzee’s eyes and published his story of police death squads, and when he visited Vlakplaas himself, he was lucky to get out alive. Max is best known as founder and editor of the Afrikaans newspaper Vrye Weekblad, and for his weekly television report on the Truth Commission and the programme Special Assignment. His story takes you on a remarkable journey, from the contradictions of history to the triumphs and troubles of the present, from the halls of parliament to the desert of Namibia, from burning townships to the headquarters of covert operations. You’ll meet generals and guerrillas, presidents and hit men. And its all reported with the straight-shooting, uncompromising, outspoken frankness that has won him admiration and got him into trouble with the new government as well as the old. Pale Native is a story filled with drama, about the risks of investigative journalism in the front line. It’s controversial, because Max, as always, is not afraid to expose what others want hidden from view. It’s insightful, giving a fascinating analysis of southern African politics from a skilled reporter who has seen it first hand.

Sharpeville

Sharpeville
Author: Tom Lodge
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2011-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191617342

On 21 March 1960 several hundred black Africans were injured and 69 killed when South African police opened fire on demonstrators in the township of Sharpeville, protesting against the Apartheid regime's racist 'pass' laws. The Sharpeville Massacre, as the event has become known, signalled the start of armed resistance in South Africa, and prompted worldwide condemnation of South Africa's Apartheid policies. The events at Sharpeville deeply affected the attitudes of both black and white in South Africa and provided a major stimulus to the development of an international 'Anti-Apartheid' movement. In Sharpeville, Tom Lodge explains how and why the Massacre occurred, looking at the social and political background to the events of March 1960, as well as the sequence of events that prompted the shootings themselves. He then broadens his focus to explain the long-term consequences of Sharpeville, explaining how it affected South African politics over the following decades, both domestically and also in the country's relationship with the rest of the world.

A Century of South African Theatre

A Century of South African Theatre
Author: Loren Kruger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-11-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350008028

“Theatre is not part of our vocabulary”: Sipho Sepamla's provocation in 1981, the year of famous anti-apartheid play Woza Albert!, prompts the response, yes indeed, it is. A Century of South African Theatre demonstrates the impact of theatre and other performances-pageants, concerts, sketches, workshops, and performance art-over the last hundred years. Its coverage includes African responses to pro-British pageants celebrating white Union in 1910, such as the Emancipation Centenary of the abolition of British colonial slavery in 1934 organized by Griffiths Motsieloa and HIE Dhlomo, through anti-apartheid testimonial theatre by Athol Fugard, Maishe Maponya, Gcina Mhlophe, and many others, right up to the present dramatization of state capture, inequality and state violence in today's unevenly democratic society, where government has promised much but delivered little. Building on Loren Kruger's personal observations of forty years as well as her published research, A Century of South African Theatre provides theoretical coordinates from institution to public sphere to syncretism in performance in order to highlight South Africa's changing engagement with the world from the days of Empire, through the apartheid era to the multi-lateral and multi-lingual networks of the 21st century. The final chapters use the Constitution's injunction to improve wellbeing as a prompt to examine the dramaturgy of new problems, especially AIDS and domestic violence, as well as the better known performances in and around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kruger critically evaluates internationally known theatre makers, including the signature collaborations between animator/designer William Kentridge, and Handspring Puppet Company, and highlights the local and transnational impact of major post-apartheid companies such as Magnet Theatre.

Trackers

Trackers
Author: Deon Meyer
Publisher: Random House Canada
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2011-09-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307360180

Lemmer's First Law: Don't get involved. But when Emma le Roux looks at him with pleading eyes, when the roof of his Karoo house needs big repairs, when the cause is good and just, laws can be broken. So he sighs, and says, yes, he'll ride shotgun for two rare black rhinos. Bad decision. Because on a dark and dusty road in Limpopo, they stick a Smith & Wesson Model 500 against his head. They kick him and beat him, they lie, they deceive him, and they steal his Glock, the one with his fingerprints all over it. They should have killed him. And now he goes after them--the start of a trail of violence that will run the length and breadth of a country, and touch many lives. It will leave a trail of blood through the first private-investigation dossier of former cop Mat Joubert. It's a "fifty-five," police slang for a missing persons case. It will stomp fear and horror through the life of Milla Strachan, who walked out on her rich, cheating husband and abusive teenage son to start a new life. A trail of death, stretching from the Chizarira to the Cape Waterfront. And at the end of it, nobody will be untouched.

Secrets & Lies

Secrets & Lies
Author: Marléne Burger
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1770222480

This is a tale of military machination and scientific subterfuge, of combatants who disappeared without trace, and bizarre experiments carried out behind locked doors. In waging ‘total war’ during the 1970s and 1980s, South African securocrats demanded a ‘total strategy’, including secret and unconventional means to fight the perceived ‘total onslaught’ against the apartheid regime. Against that background, a group of scientists under military guidance crossed the threshold of an arcane realm, familiar to ordinary citizens only through the imaginations of fiction writers – a world marked by covert operations and germ warfare, high-stakes deals in the international arms bazaar, smoke and mirrors, plausible deniability. A world where intrigue and double-crossing are routine, where secret missions and sinister sub-plots are the milestones for life in the fast lane. Set against the backdrop of the international Cold War and South Africa’s bloody passage to democracy, the events related in this book were uncovered during ten years of investigation and made public by the trial of Wouter Basson, the first criminal prosecution in the world of the head of an official chemical and biological warfare programme. As the authors take you from combat zone to courtroom, read how one of the apartheid era’s best-kept secrets became the subject of one of the ‘new’ South Africa’s costliest legal exercises – and how the former military officer at the heart of both walked away a free man. Ten years have passed since Wouter Basson was acquitted of the criminal charges brought against him and Secrets and Lies was originally published. This eBook edition comes with a brand new foreword by author Chandre Gould.

The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas

The Man Who Killed Apartheid: The Life of Dimitri Tsafendas
Author: Harris Dousemetzis
Publisher: African Sun Media
Total Pages: 535
Release: 2024-03-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1998951391

On 6 September 1966, inside the House of Assembly in Cape Town, Dimitri Tsafendas stabbed to death Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s Prime Minister and so-called “architect of apartheid”. Tsafendas was immediately arrested and before he had even been questioned by the authorities, they declared him a madman without any political motive for the killing. In the Cape Supreme Court, Tsafendas was found unfit to stand trial on the grounds that he suffered from schizophrenia and that he had no political motive for killing Verwoerd. Tsafendas spent the next 28 years in custody, making him the longest-serving detainee in South African history. For most of his incarnation he was subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment by the prison authorities. From 2009 to 2018, Harris Dousemetzis extensively researched the assassination of Verwoerd and the life of Tsafendas. For this research, he travelled to South Africa, Mozambique, Greece, France, and Turkey, and interviewed about 150 people who either knew Tsafendas or Verwoerd or were involved with the case of the assassination. He discovered about 12,000 pages of documents on the case, most of them previously unpublished, in archival collections in South Africa, Portugal and the UK. Dousemetzis collaborated with prominent South African jurists, psychiatrists and psychologists, and concluded his research, by writing the Report to the Minister of Justice in the Matter of Dr. Verwoerd’s Assassination. The report conclusively proved that Tsafendas had assassinated Verwoerd for political reasons and that the apartheid authorities had orchestrated a massive operation to declare him insane and apolitical. This ground-breaking report and this book corrected the historical record regarding Verwoerd’s assassination and Tsafendas. The Man Who Killed Apartheid, based on Dousemetzis’s groundbreaking research, chronicles in detail Tsafendas’s life and conclusively demonstrates that he was a perfectly sane and deeply political person with a long history of political activism. At the same time, the book exposes the lie at the heart of apartheid’s posture on the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd and provides a rare picture of how the racist regime operated and what it was like to live and die under apartheid.