The Lie of 1652

The Lie of 1652
Author: Patric Tariq Mellet
Publisher: Tafelberg
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780624092124

The Lie of 1652 debunks the 'empty-land' myth and claims of a 'Bantu invasion', while outlining 220 years of war and resistance. It recounts the history of migration to the Cape by Africans, Indians, Southeast Asians and Europeans, providing a provocative perspective on the de-Africanisation of local people of colour.

The Land Wars

The Land Wars
Author: John Laband
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1776095006

Perhaps the most explosive issue in South Africa today is the question of land ownership. The central theme in this country’s colonial history is the dispossession of indigenous African societies by white settlers, and current calls for land restitution are based on this loss. Yet popular knowledge of the actual process by which Africans were deprived of their land is remarkably sketchy. This book recounts an important part of this history, describing how the Khoisan and Xhosa people were dispossessed and subjugated from the time that Europeans first arrived until the end of the Cape Frontier Wars (1779–1878). The Land Wars traces the unfolding hostilities involving Dutch and British colonial authorities, trekboers and settlers, and the San, Khoikhoin, Xhosa, Mfengu and Thembu people – as well as conflicts within these groups. In the process it describes the loss of land by Africans to successive waves of white settlers as the colonial frontier inexorably advanced. The book does not shy away from controversial issues such as war atrocities committed by both sides, or the expedient decision of some of the indigenous peoples to fight alongside the colonisers rather than against them. The Land Wars is an epic story, featuring well-known figures such as Ngqika, Lord Charles Somerset and his son, Henry, Andries Stockenström, Hintsa, Harry Smith, Sandile, Maqoma, Bartle Frere and Sarhili, and events such as the arrival of the 1820 Settlers and the Xhosa cattle-killing. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand South Africa’s past and present.

Knot of Stone

Knot of Stone
Author: Nicolaas Vergunst
Publisher: Arena books
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2011-04-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1906791945

In 1510, when the Cape of Good Hope was still revered as the Portal to the Indies, the Viceroy of Portuguese India was led ashore, attacked, slain and hurriedly buried in a shallow grave. The murder of Dom Francisco d'Almeida remains a mystery to this day. Was it the fulfilment of a prophecy or an act of poetic justice? Was it an ambush, a mutiny or even an assassination? If so, was it instigated by the King of Portugal or the Church of Rome?Knot of Stone is a tale of historical detection in which two unlikely travel companions - a restless Dutch historian, Sonja Haas, and a jaded Afrikaans archaeologist, Jason Tomas - find themselves drawn together after discovering a five-century-old skeleton at the foot of Table Mountain. Their search for new evidence leads the reader ever further north to ancestral burial sites, remote mountain sanctuaries, sacred springs, medieval monasteries and rare museum artefacts. Via various roadside encounters, including the startling revelations of a sangoma (a healer empowered by the ancestors), they reconstruct the past and their own identities, with divergent consequences. The multi-layered story is ultimately a tale of self-discovery.As a novel, Knot of Stone presents a unique and insightful revision of actual events, offering a courageous departure from mainstream historical writing. With its captivating mystery, its mixture of legend and original research, plus the karmic background of various historical individuals, this enthralling book will appeal to all those who have enjoyed the enigmatic works of Umberto Eco and Dan Brown.www.knotofstone.com

Land Matters

Land Matters
Author: Tembeka Ngcukaitobi
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1776095979

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? In Land Matters, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles the past, present and future of the land question in South Africa. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal systems of landownership were used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effects of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he evaluates the ANC’s policies on land throughout the struggle years, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government. Land Matters unpacks the government’s achievements and failures in land redistribution, restitution and tenure reform, and makes suggestions for what needs to be done in future. The book also explores the power of chiefs, the tension between communal landownership and the desire for private title, the failure of the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach, women and land reform, the role of banks, and the debates around amending the Constitution. Steering clear of the simplistic and polarising terms of the land debate, Ngcukaitobi argues for a return to the nuanced constitutional requirements of justice and equity in South Africa’s land policy. Thoughtful and provocative, Land Matters sheds light on one of the most topical, complex and urgent issues in South Africa today.

AmaBhulu

AmaBhulu
Author: Harry Booyens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 632
Release: 2013-11
Genre: Afrikaners
ISBN: 9780992159016

The West has finally realized that ""bringing Democracy"" to the Middle East and Southwest Asia is not necessarily in the best interests of Western Civilization. Radical Islam is hijacking its plans and making a mockery of Democracy itself. In South Africa, an earlier experiment in "Bestowed Democracy" is failing under a burden of abuse. Much taken with its own role in undoing apartheid a full generation earlier, the West prefers to look away. It appears to treat the plight of Western people in that country as a form of required penance. In the process, it indulges what is in effect a corrupt One-Party State Kleptocracy run along the Party Congress lines of its original mentor, the defunct Soviet Union. "AmaBhulu" is a view of South Africa through eyes different from those employed in fifty years of media reporting, social science, and politics. The author walks the reader from the 1652 landing of the Dutch to the present by following his own family bloodlines as example through the documented history of the country, supported by copious evidence. As settlers, soldiers, slaves, and indigenes, they farm, they fight, they triumph, and they lose. They are mercilessly impaled and massacred by savage African tyrants. They are hanged and fusilladed by an imperial overlord, and herded into concentration camps. Yet, they persevere to create a key Western Christian country; the envy of all Africa and a Cold War bulwark of the West. Eventually it falls to the author to describe the loss of his country through forces beyond his control. In 1797 the British Royal Navy feared South Africa would become a "Second America" for Britain, while, in the 20th century, the country was to Africa what the United States was to the world. "AmaBhulu" describes the developing crisis in the Second America that will inevitably entangle the First America. It is a study in the death of Civilization by its own collective hand; a severe warning for the West. "AmaBhulu" should give pause to every thinking Westerner.

Compact Stars

Compact Stars
Author: Norman K. Glendenning
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1468404911

A whole decades research collated, organised and synthesised into one single book! Following a 60-page review of the seminal treatises of Misner, Thorne, Wheeler and Weinberg on general relativity, Glendenning goes on to explore the internal structure of compact stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, hybrids, strange quark stars, both the counterparts of neutron stars as well as of dwarfs. This is a self-contained treatment and will be of interest to graduate students in physics and astrophysics as well as others entering the field.

Shakespeare and the Book Trade

Shakespeare and the Book Trade
Author: Lukas Erne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2013-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107354552

Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's groundbreaking Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to examine the publication, constitution, dissemination and reception of Shakespeare's printed plays and poems in his own time and to argue that their popularity in the book trade has been greatly underestimated. Erne uses evidence from Shakespeare's publishers and the printed works to show that in the final years of the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth century, 'Shakespeare' became a name from which money could be made, a book trade commodity in which publishers had significant investments and an author who was bought, read, excerpted and collected on a surprising scale. Erne argues that Shakespeare, far from indifferent to his popularity in print, was an interested and complicit witness to his rise as a print-published author. Thanks to the book trade, Shakespeare's authorial ambition started to become bibliographic reality during his lifetime.