Tag: apartheid

Mac Maharaj played a pivotal role in the liberation movement for nearly four decades. He endured brutal torture and spent twelve years imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. Maharaj smuggled out the manuscript of Mandela’s autobiography. He later returned to South Africa to build a political and military underground.

Between 1960 and 1989 in South Africa, more than 130 people were executed for crimes that had a political motive. Who were they? What did they do, and why did they do it? While many people have heard of Solomon Mahlangu, John Harris, or even Vuyisile Mini, the vast majority of executed activists remain unknown. This is despite the fact that they paid the ultimate price for their actions.

Reflections on race, language, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge projects that explore the pitfalls and possibilities that face South African universities and a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge.

The Bam family hailed from Goqwana, near Tsolo, in the Transkei region of South Africa's Eastern Cape. This book focuses on six siblings, their ancestors and particularly Fikile and Brigalia Bam. Notably, Fikile and Brigalia emerged as prominent public figures in their respective spheres.

South Africa has produced two globally recognised leaders from different eras: Jan Christiaan Smuts and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Smuts served as Prime Minister from 1919 to 1924 and again from 1939 to 1948. Mandela served as President from 1994 to 1999.

When she turned ninety, my mother sprang a final surprise on us. She started speaking in the voice of a stranger. Peter’s mother is dying. Born in England and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London apartment, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen’s.

Contesting one’s place remains central to confronting the lingering impact of colonisation and apartheid, emerging as it does out of the intermingling of our environments, histories, languages and experiences. In this volume, architects, anthropologists, artists, urban planners, activists and historians examine the ways in which people are rethinking, repurposing and reusing colonial and apartheid architecture and infrastructure.

In South Africa, women aspiring to leadership roles encounter a landscape shaped by historical inequalities and persistent socio-economic challenges. Women in leadership, particularly black women in South Africa, face a unique set of challenges deeply rooted in both historical and contemporary contexts.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) is a flagship South African public health organisation, and this book, by its first executive director and virologist Dr Barry Schoub, paints a portrait of its development, despite many challenges, towards becoming an internationally renowned partner in the struggle for global health.

In a South African context, ‘dignity’ is a word that is often supercharged, laden with meaning and emotion. Given our dark history where apartheid stripped whole groups of people of their dignity – and because of the prevailing gap between rich and poor, with South Africa having the highest Gini coefficient in the world – we not only have to believe in dignity, we must also strive to uphold it across all aspects of society.