Jonny Steinberg: 7 books

On 9 June 2003, a 43-year-old coloured man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Behind him lay a lifelong career in the 28s, South Africa's oldest and most reviled prison gang, for decades rumoured to have specialised in rape and robbery. In front of him lay the prospect...

A country is policed only to the extent that it consents to be. When that consent is withheld, cops either negotiate or withdraw. Once they do this, however, they are no longer police; their role becomes something far murkier. Several months before they exploded into xenophobic violence, Jonny Steinberg...

In this selection of his Business Day columns, Jonny Steinberg walks through Pollsmoor Prison on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and believes he sees in the jail's corridors why the US's impending war in the Middle East will fail. He meets a poverty-stricken old man who spends most of his state pension...

In the spring of 1999, in the beautiful hills of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, a young white farmer is shot dead on the dirt road running from his father's farmhouse to his irrigation fields. The murder is the work of assassins rather than robbers; a single shot behind the ear, nothing but his gun stolen,...

Als de Somalische Asad Abdullahi acht jaar oud is wordt zijn moeder voor zijn ogen gedood door rebellen. Negentien jaar later woont hij in Blikkiesdorp, een beruchte township in Kaapstad. Daar vertelt hij zijn aangrijpende verhaal aan Jonny Steinberg. Als jongen zwerft Asad door zuidoostelijk Afrika,...

At the age of twenty-nine, Sizwe Magadla is among the most handsome, well-educated, and richest of the men in his poverty-stricken village. Dr. Hermann Reuter, a son of old South West African stock, wants to show the world that if you provide decent treatment, people will come and get it, no matter...

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city’s population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered...