Wits University Press imprint: 87 books

Composing Apartheid is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid’s social and political topography, as well as how music and musicians...

A powerful analysis of events that helped galvanise resistance across civil society. The 2017 publication of Betrayal of the Promise, the report that detailed the systematic nature of state capture, marked a key moment in South Africa’s most recent struggle for democracy. In the face of growing...

The Backroom Boy opens dramatically in China, 1962. Andrew Mlangeni is one of a small select group undergoing military training there. The unannounced visitor is Mao Tse-Tung or Chairman Mao as he was known, Chairman of the Communist Party of China. Mlangeni was selected as one of the first-ever six...

Alexandra: A History is a social and political history of one of South Africa?s oldest townships. It begins with the founding of Alexandra as a freehold township in 1912 and traces its growth as a centre of black working-class life through the early years before the Nationalist government, through...

Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)

Horses were key to the colonial economies of southern Africa, buttressing the socio-political order and inspiring contemporary imaginations. Just as they had done in Europe, Asia, the Americas and North Africa, these equine colonizers not only provided power and transportation to settlers (and later...

This ethnography explores the Ngoma healing tradition as practiced in eastern Mpumalanga, South Africa. ‘Bungoma’ is an active philosophical system and healing practice consisting of multiple strands, based on the notion that humans are intrinsically exposed to each other and that this is the...

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,...

The ?Cradle of Humankind? (COH), bordering Gauteng and the North-West Province, was declared a World Heritage Site for the wealth of the human and animal fossils found there. Research based on fossils found in the area as well as signs of early human habitation have shed new light on the evolution...

This book provides an overview of the research related to psychological assessment across South Africa. The thirty-six chapters provide a combination of psychometric theory and practical assessment applications in order to combine the currently disparate research that has been conducted locally in...

Elephants are among the most magni?cent _ but also most problematic _members of South Africa's wildlife population. While they are sought after by South African and foreign tourists alike, they also have a major impact on their environment. As a result, elephant management has become a highly complex...

In the 1980s there was a surge of trade union power in South Africa. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) was prominent and innovative in this assertion of muscle.Metal that does not Bend traces Numsa?s accumulation, from a few small unions in a handful of factories to the staging...

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection consists of the notebooks in which William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd transcribed and translated the narratives, cultural information and personal histories told to them in the 1870s by a number of /Xam informants. It represents a rare and rich record of an indigenous language...

A number of researchers have tried to characterise the anatomy and behavioural systems of early hominid and early modern human populations in an attempt to understand how we became what we are. Can archaeology, palaeo-anthropology and genetics tell us how and when human cultures developed the traits...