South African History

On September 17, 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld boarded a Douglas DC6 propeller plane on the sweltering tarmac of the airport in Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo. Hours later, he would be found dead in an African jungle with an ace of spades playing card placed on his body. Hammarskjöld had been the head of the United Nations for nine years. He was legendary for his dedication to peace on Earth.

Nearly two centuries before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their epic trek to the Pacific coast, a group of three Spanish noblemen and an African survived shipwreck, famine, Indian attack, and disease to make the first crossing of North America in recorded history. Drawing on contemporary accounts and long-lost records, Robert Goodwin tells the amazing story of their odyssey through the American South.

Rhea's neighborhood is fading away—the mom-and-pop shops of her childhood forced out to make space for an artisanal kombucha brewery here, a hot yoga studio there. And everywhere, the feeling that this place is no longer meant for her. Because while their little corner of South L.A. isn't perfect, to Rhea and her two best friends, it's something even more important—it's home. And it's worth protecting. But as more white people flock to their latest edgy, urban paradise, more of Rhea's friends and family are pushed out. Until Rhea decides it's time to push back.

“Brilliant: engaged, intelligent, personal… and funny” - Financial Times Ten years after democracy arrived in South Africa here is a book that gives a voice to the Afrikaner, speaking in English about the ‘Miracle’ of the peaceful transition to majority rule – their worst nightmare. This is a book that goes beyond politics with the very human story of one man, giving insight into the hearts and minds of a people struggling to find their identity as white Africans trying to secure their place in Africa. They are seen through the eyes of a Boerejood – a half-Afrikaans, half-...

Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond’s Time to Teach brings his teachings to a new generation of listeners and provides a necessary toolkit for today’s activists in the era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Julian Bond sought to dismantle the perception of the civil rights movement as a peaceful and respectable protest that quickly garnered widespread support. Through his lectures, Bond detailed the ground-shaking disruption the movement caused, its immense unpopularity at the time, and the bravery of activists who chose to disturb order to pursue justice.

They Came Across South Mountain is a love story of four generations of one family, free people of color surviving the holocaust of slavery and Jim Crow America. The book was written by Elayne Bond Hyman and designed and crafted in collaboration with Sarah Matthews.

This riveting narrative unfolds a tumultuous chapter in history where ambition, resilience, and tragedy collide on the sun-scorched plains of South Africa. Embark on a journey through time where the indomitable spirit of the Boer farmers clashed with the might of the British Empire, driven by dreams of expansion and the glittering allure of gold and diamonds.

As a child he dreamt of changing South Africa; as a man he changed the world. Nelson Mandela spent his life battling apartheid and championing a peaceful revolution. He spent 27 years in prison and emerged as the inspiring leader of the new South Africa. He became the country’s first Black president and went on to live his dream of change.

The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa. The 26-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, during the final, fiery days of apartheid by a mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents' forgiveness of two of her killers became a symbol of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine van der Leun decided to introduce the story to an American audience. But as she delved into the case, the prevailing narrative started to unravel.

CAPE TOWN’S POPULAR high-end night spots attract an array of clientele, from young partygoers to politicians, models to moguls. In parallel with this is a sleazy underworld where control of the lucrative nightclub-security scene is the ultimate prize, for which some are prepared to pay using extortion and murder as the main currencies. South Africa’s private-security sector is massive, an informal police force increasingly relied on as confidence in traditional policing wanes. But it’s an industry tainted by ties to underworld figures and events.

Radama—the young, savvy ruler of the rising military power in Madagascar. Robert Townsend Farquhar—governor of the British island colony of Mauritius, whose plantation economy depends on slave labor. James Hastie—an enterprising East India Company sergeant, ready to take on a risky mission. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain and France face off in the southwest Indian Ocean, the destinies of these three characters intertwine.

In 1948 most White people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous White journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a Black man in the Jim Crow South. Escorted through the South's parallel Black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic Black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local Black leaders, and families of lynching victims.

En esta obra el lector conocerá las principales etapas de la historia del continente africano: la prehistoria, con la aparición de los primeros homínidos en África; los tiempos antiguos, donde se observan similitudes culturales entre el Antiguo Egipto y las sociedades subsaharianas; los siglos oscuros, el período menos conocido de la historia africana....

La historia que se esconde detrás de una de las mejores novelas de aventuras de todos los tiempos. En 1875, Henry Rider Haggard escribe Las minas del rey Salomón, probablemente una de las mejores novelas de aventuras de todos los tiempos. Muchos intuyen pero pocos conocen el correlato histórico que se oculta detrás de esta novela: la lucha entre colonos ingleses y holandeses contra las tribus africanas por el control de los recursos naturales y de los territorios.

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.

At a time when the world waits anxiously to see what will happen next in Zimbabwe - when there is little food in the country's shops, life expectancy is plunging and Zimbabweans are fleeing repression and unemployment - this book gets to grips with the man at the helm of a corrupt regime; the man behind the monster. Holland's tireless investigation begins with her having dinner with Mugabe the freedom fighter and ends in a searching interview with Zimbabwe's president in December 2007, more than 30 years later.

With his 2003 announcement of a program known as PEPFAR, George W. Bush launched an astonishingly successful American war against a global pandemic. PEPFAR played a key role in slashing HIV cases and AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the brink of epidemic control. Resilient in the face of flatlined funding and political headwinds, PEPFAR is America’s singular example of how to fight long-term plague - and win.

After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of 25 White men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in Southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

Ellis Park in Johannesburg, 24 June 1995. The Springboks versus The All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup final. Nelson Mandela steps onto the pitch wearing a Springboks shirt and, before a global audience of millions, a new country is born. This book tells the incredible story of Mandela's journey to that moment.