- Criminal & Forensic Psychology
- Maritime
- General AAS
- Tokyo
- Medical Genetics
- Shipbuilding
- Hardbacks
- Song of Songs
- Classical 1750-1820
- General AAS
- Forests & Rainforests
- Japan
- C
- Melville, Herman
- Questions & Answers
- Anderson, Sherwood
- Ginsberg, Allen
- Digital Photography
- Reading & Writing Music
- Amateur Production
- Wells, H.G.
- Bestsellers
- Data Storage & Management
- Guareschi, Giovanni
- Higgins, Jack
- Watches
- Home and Garden
- UK Electronics
- UK Books
- Health and Personal Care
- UK Sporting Goods
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- CDs and Music Downloads
- UK Software and Video Games
- UK Toys and Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Video Games
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Books On
- German Electronics
Books : Biography : Political : Countries & Regions : Africa
-
The famously taciturn South African president reveals much of himself in Long Walk to Freedom. A good deal of this autobiography was written secretly while Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years on Robben Island by South Africa's apartheid regime. Among the book's interesting revelations is Mandela's ambivalence toward his lifetime of devotion to public works. It cost him two marriages and kept him distant from a family life he might otherwise have cherished. Long Walk to Freedom also discloses a strong and generous spirit that refused to be broken under the most trying circumstances--a spirit in which just about everybody can find something to admire. --Amazon.com
-
Emerging from the dissident calibrations of literary voices joined together in the culture of protest against the apartheid regime, the distinctive writing of novelist, critic and academic J M Coetzee has become identified as one of the most finely tuned among contemporary Southern African writers. From the local recognition accorded his earliest novel Dusklands to the international acclaim with which his rewriting of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe story, Foe was received, Coetzee has dedicated himself to transforming South African writing from a blunt weapon of struggle to a delicate and incisive instrument of reflective liberation.Disgrace takes as its complex central character 52-year-old English professor David Lurie whose preoccupation with Romantic poetry--and romancing his students--threatens to turn him into a "a moral dinosaur". Called to account by the University for a passionate but brief affair with a student who is ambivalent about his embraces, David refuses to apologise, drawing on poetry before what he regards as political correctness in his claim that his "case rests on the rights of desire." Seeking refuge with his quietly progressive daughter Lucie on her isolated small holding, David finds that the violent dilemmas of the new South Africa are inescapable when the tentative emotional truce between errant father and daughter is ripped apart by a traumatic event that forces Lucie to an appalling disgrace. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry in its evocation of personal relationships, this novel is skillful--almost cunning--in its exploration of David's refusal to be accountable and his daughter's determination to make her entire life a process of accountability. Their personal dilemmas cast increasingly foreshortened shadows against the rising concerns of the emancipated community, and become a subtle metaphor for the historical unaccountability of one culture to another.
The ecstatic critical reception with which Disgrace has been received has insisted that its excellence lies in its ability to encompass the universality of the human condition. Nothing could be farther from the truth, or do the novel--and its author--a greater disservice. The real brilliance of this stylish book lies in its ability to capture and render accountable--without preaching--the specific universality of the condition of whiteness and white consciousness. Disgrace is foremost a confrontation with history that few writers would have the resources to sustain. Coetzee's vision is unforgiving--but not bleak. Against the self-piteous complaints of all declining cultures and communities who bemoan the loss of privileges that were never theirs to take, Coetzee's vision of an unredeemed white consciousness holds out--to those who reach towards an understanding of their position in history by starting again, with nothing--the possibility of "a moderate bliss." --Rachel Holmes
-
Polish writer and foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski may be in the twilight of a golden career spanning more than 40 years but The Shadow of the Sun, an alternative record of his experiences of Africa and its stupefying white heat, is perhaps his finest hour. This for a writer who, to echo the sentiments of Michael Ignatieff, has turned reportage into literature. Drawn to the Developing World through an impoverished wartime upbringing, Kapuscinski arrived in Ghana in 1957 and was on hand to witness the tumultuous years in which colonial Africa was dismantled, resulting in born-again countries ripe for ransacking by despots. From the glare of Accra airport which greets him on first arrival, to the Tanzanian night of the final pages, he crosses savannah, desert and city by foot, road and train, searching out the two most important, yet inconstant commodities on the continent: shade and water. Threatened by an Egyptian cobra, cursed with cerebral malaria and tuberculosis, plagued by black cockroaches the size of small turtles, Kapuscinski intermingles the immediate and the reflective in 29 satisfyingly fragmented vignettes, encompassing historical narratives and personal experience across a host of countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Liberia.While acknowledging European colonial culpability, he refuses to rinse his words in guilt. The Shadow of the Sun is reminiscent of Gianni Celati's Adventures in Africa, employing similarly symphonic atmospherics that can bear poetic witness to both the tragic history of Rwanda and the Ngubi beetle, which toils in the desert to produce the sweat it drinks to survive. As much about the plastic water container as the warlord and preferring the African shanty town to the Manhattan skyscraper as a monument to human achievement, what Kapuscinski, the author of Shah of Shahs describes is not Africa, which he claims does not exist except geographically but a distillation of life itself, through its religiosity, its trees, the frightening abundance of youth, sun that "curdles the blood" and terrorising, ruling armies that fall in a day. The first in a projected trilogy pulling together Africa, Central America and Asia, The Shadow of the Sun is an exceptional and humbling work of imagination and experience by a writer intent on liberating truths from fact. --David Vincent
-
-
-
Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight is a wonderfully evocative memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s African childhood. Fuller regards herself "as a daughter of Africa", who spent her early life on farms in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia throughout the turbulent 1970s and 80s, as her parents "fought to keep one country in Africa white-run", but "lost twice" in Kenya and Zimbabwe. This is a profoundly personal story about growing up with a pair of funny, tough, white African settlers, and living with their "sometimes breathlessly illogical decisions", as they move from war-torn Zimbabwe to disease and malnutrition in Malawi, and finally the "beautiful and fertile" land of Zambia.Central to Fuller’s book is the intense relations between herself and her parents, a chain-smoking father able to turn round any farm in Africa, her glamorous older sister Vanessa, and the character who sits at the heart of the book, Fuller’s "fiercely intelligent, deeply compassionate, surprisingly witty and terrifyingly mad" mother.
Fuller weaves together painful family tragedy with a wider understanding of the ambivalence of being part of a separatist white farming community in the midst of Black African independence. The majority of the book focuses on Fuller’s early years in war-torn Zimbabwe, with "more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass." This is the most successful dimension of the book, as Fuller describes growing up on farm where her father is away most nights fighting "terrorists", and stripping a rifle takes precedence over school lessons. The sections on Malawi and Zambia are more prosaic, but this is a lyrical and accomplished memoir about Africa, which is "about adjusting to a new world view" and the author’s "passionate love for a continent that has come to define, shape, scar and heal me and my family." --Jerry Brotton
-
-
In 1975, imprisoned for life on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela covertly wrote his autobiography. After painstaking months the text was smuggled out--and was promptly quashed by the African National Congress. In his later Long Walk to Freedom Mandela politely expresses "surprise" at this. Sampson reveals that Joe Slovo suppressed the book for not giving enough prominence to Communists. This revelation is remarkable--the ANC could have made much mileage from the book at a time of low fortune--yet Sampson does not follow up. There is too often a sense of eggshells lightly walked upon.Mandela improves as the prisoner's release approaches. Sampson sharply exposes the machinations of those undermining the ANC's struggle. The CIA knew of the Third Force years before the ANC, yet said nothing. Right-wing governments attacked "Mandela the Communist", preferring to promote Inkhata's Buthelezi, at that time secretly and violently colluding with de Klerk's apartheid regime. Against the small-minded figures of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl it is Mandela who emerges here a giant. South Africa won her freedom through Mandela: his strength of character and willingness to forgive helped push a country into an alternative future, avoiding the racial civil war almost all predicted. Yet he and his kin paid an awful price. Sampson draws a painful, clear picture of a disintegrating family: dislocation from children; the terrible effects of the war on Winnie, and her increasingly erratic, later murderous behaviour; Mandela's own aching loneliness. It is in capturing Madiba, the ultimate public figure, at his most intense and private, that Sampson's Mandela succeeds best. --Chris Woods
-
On Good Friday in 1914, a young British Army officer named Stewart Gore-Browne first glimpsed a lake in what was then Northern Rhodesia that the local Bemba tribe called Shiwa Ngandu ("Lake of the Royal Crocodiles"). At that moment, a love affair began which would last his lifetime, as the enraptured Gore-Browne set about creating a very British idyll in the African bush, complete with redbrick house and a terrace on which uniformed staff would serve champagne and cocktails. This is the complicated story of a man, his colonial vision, and the burden it became, set against the country in which he battles to realise it.Christina Lamb has assembled the story from the mass of diaries and correspondence that lay within the now crumbling and neglected house. It is an extraordinary tale that leaps off the page with the grace of a springbok. Gore-Browne initially appears an extinct species, all Harrovian vowels, and prone to pepper with lead shot anything that moves. He is, however, infused with a liberal, humane streak that leads him in later life to support Kenneth Kaunda and the UNIP in their fight for power. Indeed, Kaunda said of him, "... he [Gore-Browne] was born an English gentleman, and died a Zambian gentleman".
Gore-Browne's personal life progressed from an unrequited love to a dramatic marriage, while still indulging in a formidably passionate correspondence with a favourite aunt. There are times when you wish for a timely swipe of the novelist's pen, but it is the nature of this beast that questions remain unanswered; what holds this engrossing chronicle in place is the Africa House itself, and the lives that unfold in and around it, perched incongruously as it is in a country that has outgrown it. --David Vincent
-
The famously taciturn South African president reveals much of himself in Long Walk to Freedom. A good deal of this autobiography was written secretly while Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years on Robben Island by South Africa's apartheid regime. Among the book's interesting revelations is Mandela's ambivalence toward his lifetime of devotion to public works. It cost him two marriages and kept him distant from a family life he might otherwise have cherished. Long Walk to Freedom also discloses a strong and generous spirit that refused to be broken under the most trying circumstances--a spirit in which just about everybody can find something to admire. --Amazon.com
-
-
Archbishop Desmond Tutu stands alongside Nelson Mandela as one of the most iconic figures of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. As Archbishop of Cape Town throughout the 1980s, Tutu came to symbolise dignified, rational opposition to the iniquities of the apartheid regime, a faithful irreverence for unjust authority that led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. In 1995 he took up his greatest challenge: he was appointed Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the remarkable yet harrowing attempt by South Africans to come to terms with the gross violations of human rights committed throughout the apartheid era by offering amnesty and forgiveness rather than punishment and dismissal.No Future without Forgiveness is Tutu's remarkable personal memoir of his time as Chair of the Commission. It records his insistence on the need to discover a "third way" in the healing of the national psyche, and his powerful belief that "we can indeed transcend the conflicts of the past, we can hold hands as we realise our common humanity". Yet what is so striking about this memoir is his appreciation of the personal cost that the painful testimony of the Commission caused. He grapples with the theological, political and ethical objections to the Commission, as well as offering an absorbing account of the fall of apartheid, the birth of the Commission, and his own lifelong fight for justice and equality. The book offers uncompromising, often horrific, accounts of atrocities and sickening human brutality, from the emotive cases of Steve Biko and Winnie Mandela to the cases of "the little people": those whose voices are so often drowned out or forgotten in the process of political transformation. Tutu's characteristic humour, resilience and compassion are evoked in this memoir in a way that demonstrates how essential they have been to his unique political style and his ability to get results where all others failed. He recalls during the darkest days of apartheid's "vicious awfulness" when preaching about God's authority being "frequently tempted to whisper in God's ear, 'For goodness sake, why don't You make it more obvious that You are in charge?'"
No Future without Forgiveness could be profitably read alongside Antje Krog's equally compelling Country of My Skull, as it considers the emotional toll that such a process of national soul searching has had upon its participants. As Tutu himself points out, "it is a costly business to try to heal a wounded and traumatised people, and those engaging in that crucial task will perhaps bear the brunt themselves ... we were, in Henri Nouwen's celebrated phrase, 'wounded healers'". No Future without Forgiveness stands as the eloquent testimony of one of South Africa's most admired wounded healers. --Rachel Holmes
-
Ask any foreign editor on a national paper what part of the job gives them the most grief, and you'll almost certainly be told, "the foreign correspondents". Almost without exception, the reporters who bring back the best stories from war zones are neurotic, dysfunctional, paranoid and almost impossible to deal with. And if The Bang-Bang Club is anything to go by, you can include war photographers in the same category. The Bang-Bang Club was the name given to four South African photo-journalists, Greg Marinovich, Joao Silva, Ken Oosterbroek and Kevin Carter, who made a name for themselves going into the townships to capture first-hand the violence that erupted in South Africa between ANC supporters and the predominantly Zulu Inkhata party after the release of Nelson Mandela and prior to the first democratic elections. As a guide to the different factions and as a record of brutality, the book cannot be faulted. The British media predictably only ever reported the more sensational atrocities, and The Bang-Bang Club is a potent reminder of the ever-present violence and hatred that have dominated South African life since the early 1990s. Where the authors are on shakier ground is in the analysis of their own condition. Marinovich writes of the "addiction to adrenaline" in his pursuit of the story, and we do get to hear the downside of the booze, drugs and failed relationships that were a by-product of this addiction. But though Marinovich admits to questioning his motivation in getting up close and personal to the violence, he rather lets himself and the others off the hook with the notion that everything is justified by the importance of the story. This is as maybe, but another interesting line of enquiry might have been to ask whether the photographers' sublimated their own violent urges through their work. In other words, they let the death squads act out their feelings, while still retaining a moral high ground. The Bang-Bang Club exacted a high price of membership; Oosterbroek was killed by a stray bullet, Carter committed suicide and Marinovich was badly wounded and it's certainly not a club I would have been keen to join myself. But whatever you might think of the authors' psychiatric condition, you have to give them credit for exposing the stories that other journalists refused to touch. As The Bang-Bang Club might have said, "It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it." --John Crace
-
The famously taciturn South African president reveals much of himself in Long Walk to Freedom. A good deal of this autobiography was written secretly while Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years on Robben Island by South Africa's apartheid regime. Among the book's interesting revelations is Mandela's ambivalence toward his lifetime of devotion to public works. It cost him two marriages and kept him distant from a family life he might otherwise have cherished. Long Walk to Freedom also discloses a strong and generous spirit that refused to be broken under the most trying circumstances--a spirit in which just about everybody can find something to admire. --Amazon.com
-
The famously taciturn South African president reveals much of himself in Long Walk to Freedom. A good deal of this autobiography was written secretly while Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years on Robben Island by South Africa's apartheid regime. Among the book's interesting revelations is Mandela's ambivalence toward his lifetime of devotion to public works. It cost him two marriages and kept him distant from a family life he might otherwise have cherished. Long Walk to Freedom also discloses a strong and generous spirit that refused to be broken under the most trying circumstances--a spirit in which just about everybody can find something to admire. --Amazon.com
-
In the year following South Africa's first democratic elections, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to investigate human rights abuses committed under the apartheid regime. Presided over by God's own diplomat, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the first hearings of the commission were held in April 1996. During the following two years of hearings, South Africans were daily exposed to traumatic revelations and public testimony about their traumatic past, and--like the world that looked on--continued to discover that the relationship between truth and reconciliation is far more complex than they had ever imagined.Antjie Krog, a prominent South African poet and journalist, led the South African Broadcasting Corporation team that for two years reported daily on the hearings. Like the Truth Commission itself, Krog's Country of My Skull gives central prominence to the power of the testimony of the victims, combining the reportage skills of the journalist with the poet's ability to let previously unheard voices emerge with their stories. Extreme forms of torture, abuse and state violence were the daily fare of the Truth Commission. Many of those involved with its proceedings, including Krog herself, suffered personal stresses--ill health, mental breakdown, dissolution of relationships--in the face of both the relentless onslaught of the truth, and the continuing subterfuges of unrelenting perpetrators.
Krog's painful but precise account captures the essential character of the Truth Commission; that it was not a court convened to expose and punish culpability, but a forum for the new, still deeply divided, nation to bare its soul. Many, including clinical psychologist Nomfundo Walaza have argued that the creation of guilt was not the real purpose of the commission: "In essence we are dealing here with a definition of humanity…whites with their self-centred, selfish, capitalistic character have never been able to fathom the essence of humanity." Trying to fathom the essence of humanity, the depth of the voices of ordinary people, her country, and her self, is at the core of Krog's remarkable and uniquely challenging account. --Rachel Holmes
-
-
-
Owen Sheers, already picked out as poetry's bright hope by poet laureate Andrew Motion, reveals with The Dust Diaries that he is also a dab hand at biography, travel writing and fiction--all in one gripping book. A stray comment from his grandmother one summer afternoon whets his interest in her uncle--a poet called Arthur Shearly Cripps--and the more Sheers finds out, the more Cripps and his life intrigues him. Gradually, a fragmentary portrait emerges of this distant relative who left England for Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) where he lived as a missionary until his death.Given the assumption of guilt against missionaries of the era, readers may well be surprised to find themselves warming to Cripps. He was clearly a thorn in the side of both the colonial administration and the Anglican church, constantly siding with the Africans. Yet Sheers does avoid the temptation of making him a saint. Why did this successful man leave England? The untold dust diaries of experience are what Sheers imagines as he tries to come closer to his relative. The book successfully shuffles fictionalised episodes from Cripps's life, including wartime adventure, with Sheers's visits to Zimbabwe. Sheers writes lyrically and vividly of each experience. We come to know his remarkable ancestor, the Shona people he lived with and the troubles and beauty of their land. Fittingly, it is at the all-night, all-singing, all-dancing Shearly Cripps Festival--held at Cripps's grave--that Sheers finally learns what his ancestor means to him, in a very Shona way. --Stefan Tobler
-
