NCW Libraries

Before 1652 there were no labourers, no workers, no servants and no servitude. All that was, was labour of love. Black people worked their own farms. They were Masters on their own right. The African land and its wealth gave our great grand parents the right to be Masters. Black children are the children of Masters! They have the right to know that the great are only great because we are on our knees! They have the right to know because knowledge...

Tracing the expansion of South African business into other areas of Africa in the years after apartheid, Richard A. Schroeder explores why South Africans have not always made themselves welcome guests abroad. By looking at investments in Tanzania, a frontline state in the fight for liberation, Schroeder focuses on the encounter between white South Africans and Tanzanians and the cultural, social, and economic controversies that have emerged as South...

The appointment of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa in 1994 signalled the end of apartheid and transition to a new democratic constitution. This book studies discursive trends during the first twenty years of the new democracy, outlining the highlights and challenges of transforming policy, practice and discursive formations. The book analyses a range of discourses which signal how and by what processes the linguistic landscape and identities...

Much has been made about South Africa's transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. "Memory" features prominently in the country's reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). What is slavery to me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South...

The classic story of life in apartheid South Africa Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education,...

Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. With an incisive...

Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo travels to Johannesburg on an errand for a friend and to visit his son, Absalom, only to learn Absalom has been accused of murdering white city engineer and social activist Arthur Jarvis and stands very little chance of receiving mercy.

Sandra Laing, a distinctly mixed-race South African woman, is born to white parents during the apartheid era. Despite her upbringing as a white girl, Sandra is eventually classified as 'Coloured' by the government and stripped of the rights with which the rest of her family is privileged. And when she begins a love affair with a local vegetable dealer, Sandra finds herself cut off from her past and living the hard life of a truly black woman in a...

"Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy. Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles...

Working for P. W. Botha, Dr. Neil Barnard opens talks with imprisoned Nelson Mandela. But lesser known are the secret talks that take place in a rural English manor house. Both sides may win or lose all, including their own lives. Botha learns of the British talks and, with the inevitable demise of apartheid, he intends to control the endgame by using the tactics of divide and rule. Against all the odds, a precious arena of frail trust between the...